Box 13 scandal

The Box 13 scandal occurred in Alice, Texas during the Senate election of 1948.[1] Lyndon B. Johnson was on the verge of losing and he decided to win the election by creating a scandal throughout the state of Texas. He was in a very tight race with Coke Stevenson and they were in the middle of a run-off. Stevenson was about 854 votes ahead of Johnson during the run-off. Stevenson was even ahead by mid-day, but then 200 votes for Johnson were discovered and he won by 87 votes out of 1 million voters.[1]

Who was Involved

Stevenson became very suspicious of this and he went to check it out. Stevenson noticed that the last 200 ballots were all very different. Some of them had different color ink, new names were in alphabetical order, and the handwriting appeared to be identical. Stevenson had a judge who he was friends with start an investigation and Johnson had Abe Fortas, a friend of his, to come in and help with the legal plans during this investigation. The biggest question that needed to be answered was, did Johnson go to his friend George Parr, a member of the Democratic party in Texas and ask him to help him out.[1]

The Aftermath

The investigation went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, ruled that the federal government was not allowed to get involved with a state election. This ruling was able to seal the fate of the election. Johnson won the election and the one thing no one could figure out is if Johnson spoke with George Parr, in south Texas that day, which resulted in box 13 having 200 ballots that were missed and gave Johnson the victory.[1]

Consequences

After everything was over, some may have thought consequences would be inevitable.[2] That is not the case in this scenario. Since Johnson won the election, there would be no charges and nothing was able to be proven that Johnson actually had the box stuffed.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "The Mystery of Ballot Box 13". Washington Post. March 4, 1990.
  2. ↑ "How Johnson won the Election He'd Lost". New York Time. February 11, 1990.

External links

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