Election fraud: LBJ's magical Senate win and the Box 13 Scandal in Texas.
From the book "Big Wonderful Thing." The book is about Texas, not LBJ's anatomy.
"...the result, after a July primary election eliminated a third candidate and sent Johnson and Stevenson into a runoff, was about as narrow as it could be. The return from the Texas Election Bureau five days after the second primary vote showed Johnson behind Stevenson by 349 votes. But that was an unofficial return. The chess game then began, with the candidates making calls to the vote brokers who could bring in enough ballots to shift the tally one way or the other. The place to get those precious new votes was from the feudal kingdoms of South Texas, particularly from bosses like George Parr, who controlled not only Duval County but had some sway next door in Jim Wells and other border counties where voters could be called in if necessary from across the Rio Grande. “The moon is high,” some unnamed official is said to have casually reported to the Johnson forces. “The river is low. How many votes do you need?” In Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County, there fortuitously appeared a previously uncounted 203 votes. The tally in that now-legendary tin ballot box—box 13—was spectacularly suspicious: 202 for Johnson, only 1 for Stevenson. Even more suspicious was the fact that the names of the voters were in alphabetical order and all were written in a different color of ink from that used for the rest of the precinct’s voter list. Stevenson dispatched a team of lawyers to Alice, the county seat of Jim Wells County, to inspect the suspicious voting list of box 13. They were warned ahead of time, as one of the lawyers remembered, “that they were known to kill people down there.” When they got to Alice, they found themselves being tracked as they walked down the street by a group of sullen, heavily armed enforcers. And it turned out that the voting list they wanted to see was locked away in a bank that just happened to be owned by George Parr. They were not allowed to see it and were advised to get out of town. That didn’t sit right with Coke Stevenson, who went down to Alice himself, this time accompanied by Frank Hamer, now sixty-four years old, no longer a Texas Ranger but working for the Texas Company. But he was still in possession of Old Lucky, his single-action Colt .45 revolver, which he had a special Ranger commission to carry. “He appeared to be an old man,” one of Stevenson’s lawyers thought. But he revised that impression as Hamer walked with Stevenson down the dusty main street of Alice on the way to Parr’s bank, past ranks of menacing, heavily armed border henchmen—“when Frank Hamer walked down the street,” the lawyer remembered, “those clusters of people parted.” People on the sidewalks were whispering Hamer’s name in awe. When the group reached the bank, more pistoleros barred the way. Hamer scattered them, at least according to lore, with one word: “Git!” But the battle over who won the 1948 Democratic nomination for Texas senator wasn’t settled that day in Alice. Nor was it settled a week later at a meeting of the Democratic Party’s State Executive Committee in a Fort Worth hotel, where one member had a heart attack amid the heart-pounding tension as the committee rejected, by a vote of 28 to 29, Stevenson’s claim that the election had been a fraud. It would take a furious legal scramble and a last-minute decision from Supreme Court justice Hugo Black—effectively shutting down Stevenson’s investigation of ballot-box tampering—to clear the way for Johnson’s victory. But nothing could clear the air. The 1948 senatorial primary election would remain the closest (out of almost 1,000,000 votes cast, Johnson led by only 87) and cloudiest in Texas history."
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