Given the recent news, I've been researching past election fraud allegations. I keep finding mention about how LBJ "delivered" the south to JFK and Richard Daley handing Chicago and thereby Illinois to the Democrats. How much of this is a conspiracy theorizing/sour grapes and how much is historical?
Are there any other elections notable for alleged or actual election fraud? I'm also curious about how seriously the allegations were taken at the time and how they were reported.
All numbers from Dave Leip's Presidential Atlas, uselectionatlas.org
The first thing you should note is that, even though 1960 was the closest election of the 20th century in terms of popular vote (49.72% for Kennedy vs 49.55% for Nixon), and even though Illinois was within two tenths of a percentage point at a ~9,000 vote margin, Kennedy got 303 electoral votes with 269 to win (15 southern electors refused to vote for Kennedy in hopes of bringing the election to the House...if that wasn't the case Kennedy would've had an even more emphatic 318). Illinois' 27 electoral votes would not have swung 1960's election, rather, it would've cut that margin to 276. Tight, but still more than, say, George W. Bush got in 2000 (271).
So now that it's clear that Nixon would not have won the White House by flipping Illinois by itself, what else would Nixon have needed to swing to win the White House? First off, it's important to point out that Nixon in 1960 did better than any Republican had in the Deep South since Herbert Hoover won it in 1928 against Al Smith (the Catholic issue), and Nixon won the southern states of Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and Oklahoma in 1960. Now, Ike had won Texas and Louisiana in 1956 (and Texas in 1952 as well), but Kennedy succeeded in bringing them back into the fold in 1960...in the case of Texas, by a narrow two point margin translating to a bit over 36,000 votes. That with the king of Texas politics, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a known dirty operator, at the bottom of the Democratic ticket.
Nixon's fraud case, at a minimum, has to be that both Daley stole Illinois for Kennedy and that Johnson stole Texas for Kennedy in the same election. Is this case there? It's not really clear that it is, although the Republican Party certainly started a whispering campaign to that effect re: Texas.
Other close Kennedy states that, plus Illinois, would've swung the election to Nixon include Minnesota, Michigan, New Jersey, and South Carolina, all of which Kennedy won by under 3%. In the case of New Jersey, he won it by under 1%.
The 1960 election, incidentally, was the first election in which Alaska and Hawaii were states, and Richard Nixon made and kept a campaign promise to campaign in all fifty states. This included an incredibly time-wasting trip to Alaska and Hawaii that many commentators at the time thought cost Nixon the election.