tontoz wrote:The Chicago mob helped get Kennedy elected President through the unions.
I'm from Chicago, and I lived there back then (though I was too young to vote in 1960). Your words are somewhat elliptical. There's no question that the unions in Chicago (and pretty much everywhere else in the country) were pro-Kennedy (pro-Democrat as always) and mobilized to get the vote out. I'm not sure how "the Chicago mob" figured in (or exactly what that was).
There were certainly plenty of allegations of voter fraud -- but the Daley machine wouldn't have needed the mob for that!
Given that the state went for Kennedy by only 9000 votes (!), cries of "fraud" would be expected from the losers, as such a fraud might easily tipped the result. That said, quite a number of investigations were done into the question, and they didn't turn up much. Here's a pretty thorough article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2000/10/was_nixon_robbed.htmlIn any case, the phrase "helped get Kennedy elected" doesn't apply in a precise sense (though of course the more states he won the more likely he'd be elected). That is, had Illinois gone for Nixon, Kennedy would have still won the Presidency. An extremely close race would have been even closer, but the result would have been the same.
Btw, Stephen Levitt -- the Freakonomics guy -- has this to say: "I once had a research assistant spend a month going through old voting records to find any evidence of fraud in the 1960 presidential election in Illinois. We couldn’t find a thing. There are lots of ways to cheat that we wouldn’t have detected, but the easiest ones we likely would have found. Honestly, I was shocked we found nothing."
I can understand his shock.
I'll only add that it was widely understood by Chicagoans back then that the Southern Illinois vote was "impure" as well -- in the other direction, though of course for the same reasons!
