By Edward Achorn

The traditional method of stealing close elections in America is to count the votes after the election, determine the number of ballots needed to win, and flood the ballot boxes with a greater number of dubious or fraudulent ballots.

Lyndon Baines Johnson complained he lost a special election for Senate in 1941 by that method.

He was admonished by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a big supporter.

“Lyndon, apparently you Texans haven’t learned one of the first things we learned up in New York State, and that is when the election is over you have to sit on the ballot boxes,” Roosevelt, a former governor of New York, told the future president from Texas. (“The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power,” by Robert A. Caro, page 742.)

Later, Johnson may have used his hard-won experience to steal the 1948 Senate election.

As Wikipedia recounts, “The Box 13 scandal was an event which occurred in Alice, Texas during the Senate election of 1948. Lyndon B. Johnson was on the verge of losing the election to Coke Stevenson. Six days after polls had closed, 202 additional ballots were discovered in Precinct 13, which were in Johnson’s favor.”

That election, which Johnson “won” by 87 votes, earned him the nickname of “Landslide Lyndon.”

Later Johnson became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

(Read Edward Achorn’s books about American history.)