Did you know that Lyndon B. Johnson’s first election was rigged?

            That’s right! During the Democratic primary in 1948, when Lyndon B. Johnson ran for the senate seat in Texas, the vote was so close between him and Coke Stevenson that a recount was called for. The infamous Box 13, from the town of Alice in Jim Wells County ended up finding an additional 203 votes. Of those votes, 202 were for LBJ. The problem with those votes were that the “voters had signed their names in alphabetical order and all had identical handwriting.”[1] This gave LBJ a narrow victory of a mere 87 votes. He was given the title of “Landslide Lyndon” after he won the senate seat in 1949.[2] It sure looks like LBJ would stop at nothing to win the election, even to go so far as to have it rigged.

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[1] Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 413.

[2] Ibid, 414.