A history of presidential candidates who’ve made allegations

by Fred Lucas

The current election is not the first time a candidate has charged that the game was rigged. The new book, Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections, delves into the common thread regarding the most controversial presidential elections in history.

The focus is on elections that dragged well beyond Election Day, decided by another branch of government. Here’s excerpts from three of the elections featured in the book.

1824: John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson believed the presidency was his. He clearly made the most impressive showing, carrying a majority of electoral votes in 11 states—Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Tennessee. In an election defined by regional preference, Jackson was the only national candidate.

John Adams won the formerly Federalist strongholds of the six New England states, plus New York. William Crawford carried only Delaware, his home state of Georgia, and Virginia. It was enough to put him in third place.

On Dec. 1, 1824, the Electoral College announced the results. Jackson won the most Electoral College votes, winning 99 votes to the 84 votes for Adams. However, he didn’t have a majority, or 131, of the electoral votes that he needed. Despite coming in last place in the popular vote, Crawford would actually beat Henry Clay in the Electoral College, 41 voters to Clay’s 37 votes.

After arriving in Washington on Dec. 7, 1824, Jackson wrote a letter to political supporter and former military ally John Coffee in Tennessee informing him of rumors that Adams and Clay had struck a deal, or would do so if they haven’t already.

Before the vote, a Philadelphia newspaper, the Colombian Observer, published an anonymous letter on Jan. 28 claiming Clay would back Adams in return for being named secretary of state. Clay strongly denied this.

Most of Clay’s supporters, as well as the remaining Federalists, backed Adams in the House, enough to give him a single vote victory. The House delegations of three states that Jackson carried, Illinois, Louisiana, and Maryland, went to Adams. This gave Adams a majority of 13 out of 24 states.

Though not the first president elected after a drawn out process, Adams was the only president to assume office without a majority of the electoral votes.

1876: Rutherford Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden

Democrats used violence, lynching, and riots to scare blacks away from voting, knowing it was possible for Republicans to carry some Southern states. Republicans were intent that two could play at this game, and in some cases actually sought to persuade blacks to vote by shotgun.

The day before the election, U.S. Marshal J.H. Pierce of the Northern District of Mississippi telegraphed Republican National Committee Chairman Zach Chandler, asserting that “the election in the northern half of the state will be a farce … Colored and white Republicans will not be allowed to vote in many counties.
The Tilden clubs are armed with Winchester rifles and shotguns and declare that they will carry the election at all hazards. In several counties of my district leading white and colored Republicans are now refugees asking for protection.”

On Nov. 7, 1876, Tilden won the national popular vote 4,288,546 to 4,034,311 votes for Hayes, and 184 to 165 in the Electoral College. More than 80 percent of eligible voters actually turned out, some reportedly voting more than once, and others having their votes shredded if it was for the “wrong candidate.”

It was after midnight. The RNC’s Chandler—like Rutherford Hayes—had turned in for the night convinced of the party’s loss. But using Chandler’s signature from the RNC headquarters, Daniel Sickles telegraphed the Republican governors of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana to say, “With your state sure for Hayes, he is elected. Hold your state.”

At 3 a.m., South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Daniel Chamberlain responded on a telegraph machine, “All right. South Carolina is for Hayes. Need more troops.”

Three days after the election, Nov. 10, President Grant issued an order to General W.T. Sherman to instruct generals in Florida and Louisiana:

“No man worthy of the office of President should be willing to hold it if it counted in or placed there by fraud. Either party can afford to be disappointed by the result, but the country cannot afford to have the result tainted by suspicion of illegal or false returns.”

2000: George W. Bush vs. Al Gore

The first Tuesday of November in 2000 came the same day as the Election Day 1876—on the seventh. Half the country may have had better things to do than follow the Bore and Gush contest before election, but a decisive majority of Americans were glued after Election Day.

Bush would almost certainly have had significantly more votes had the networks not called Florida before polls closed in the heavily-Republican Panhandle, which is in the Central time zone. Gore campaign strategist Bob Beckel said that Bush lost at least 8,000 votes in the Panhandle alone because of the incorrect reporting.

Meanwhile, Republican polling firm McLaughlin and Associates estimated that Bush lost 11,500 votes because the networks reported the polls were closed in the Panhandle. Economist John Lott estimated between 7,500 and 10,000 voters in Republican counties were dissuaded from showing up.

In the popular vote, Gore beat Bush nationally with 50,996,582 to 50,456,062. That’s a half million votes. Neither candidate had 270 votes in the Electoral College. Gore had 266 votes. Bush had 246. The 20-electoral vote spread was not that different from Hayes-Tilden.

Democratic lawyers also began targeting the overseas absentee ballots from the military—which seemed to be more likely Republican voters. The attorneys threatened to sue Seminole County, where election officials corrected errors on thousands of applications for absentee ballots—many for military personnel. Democrats also targeted Duval County, which had one of the heaviest military populations in the United States. This prompted Republicans to say Democrats wanted to disenfranchise military voters.

Before this, Democrats had been able to control much of the message of demanding that every vote be counted. But when a memo surfaced from Democratic attorney Mark Herron that laid out a legal strategy for disqualifying military votes, Democrats found themselves on the defense. Despite a public relations problem, Democrats managed to disqualify 1,420 military ballots over various legal technicalities by Nov. 17.

Retired Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, hero of the Gulf War and Bush supporter, issued a strong statement, asserting: “It’s a very sad day in our country when the men and women of our country are serving abroad and facing danger on a daily basis in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, or on ships like the USS George Washington, yet because of some technicality out of ‘their control, they are denied the right to vote for the president of the United States, who will be their commander-in-chief.’”

by David Bacon

Editor’s note:
This is a continuation of last week When the river turned yellow

In the late 1980s, the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari first declared the Cananea mine bankrupt, and then sold it to the Larrea family’s Grupo Mexico for $475 million in 1990. That’s the equivalent of the last three months of Grupo Mexico’s current profits.

Salinas also sold the neighboring Nacozari mine, almost as big as Cananea, to the Larreas in 1988. In 1997, Grupo Mexico partnered with Pennsylvania-based Union Pacific to buy Mexico’s main north-south railroad for $527 million, and ended all passenger service. Two years later, Grupo Mexico bought ASARCO itself, its former parent, for $1.18 billion, gaining ownership of mines and smelters in the United States.  

Today, the corporation’s board of directors has interlocking ties with many Mexican banks and media companies, and with U.S. corporations as well. Director Claudio X. González Laporte, for instance, is board chair of Kimberley Clark de Mexico, the Mexican subsidiary of the U.S. paper giant. González Laporte is a past director of General Electric, Kellogg, Home Depot, and the Mexican media giant Televisa, and was special adviser to the Mexican president.

By the late 1990s, Grupo Mexico had a history of labor conflicts, as it reduced payroll to increase profits. In 1997, railroad workers mounted strikes over plans to reduce their workforce of 13,000 by more than half. They lost. In 1998, Cananea miners struck over company demands to trim its directly employed labor force by 1,000 jobs, while hiring non-union workers at lower wages through contractors. Threatened with military occupation of the mine, miners ended their strike, but more than 800 were not rehired.

The miners were fighting a rearguard battle to keep the wages and conditions they’d won over decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mexican miners had better protective laws than miners in the United States, controlling exposure to the silica dust produced by crushing ore. They made good wages and lived in homes built with government loans.

After the miners lost the 1998 strike, however, Grupo Mexico disconnected exhaust ventilation pipes on the roof of its main ore concentrator building. Dust in work areas reached knee-high levels. Grupo Mexico also closed the Hospital Ronquillo, which had provided health care to miners’ families. For 80 years, the mine had been responsible for providing water service to the town. After the strike, Grupo Mexico said the town had to fend for itself.  

When Grupo Mexico announced it was terminating 135 workers who maintained the tailings ponds, miner Rene Enriquez Leon warned that a spill could reach the headwaters of the Sonora River and the farming region downstream. “It would be an ecological disaster,” he predicted.  

In 2006, an explosion in Grupo Mexico’s Pasta de Conchos coal mine in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, trapped 65 miners underground. After six days, the company and government authorities called off rescue attempts. The head of the union, Napoleon Gómez Urrutia, accused those responsible of “industrial homicide.” In response, the government charged him with fraud.

Gómez fled Mexico and was given sanctuary in Canada, where he’s lived with the assistance of the United Steelworkers (the union for U.S. copper miners). After years of appeals, Mexican courts threw out the charges against him. Nevertheless, Gomez continues to stay in Canada, since the government won’t guarantee his safety and freedom if he returns.

Antonio Navarette, who began working in Cananea in 1985, says that by the mid-2000s the lack of safety was producing “a psychosis of fear. Once you went in, you didn’t know if you’d come back out again.” The machinery wasn’t given preventative maintenance, he charges, including collectors for evacuating dust. Accidents grew more frequent; workers lost hands and fingers. The accelerating problems, he believes, “made it clear that the company was pushing us to go on strike. But we decided things couldn’t continue, because otherwise we were going to die there.”

For the first three years of the strike, Mexican labor law kept the company from legally operating the facility. Then the government declared the strike illegal, and in 2010, federal soldiers and police occupied the town and reopened the Cananea mine. Despite that, Seccion 65 continues to organize strike activity. The union also continued to monitor safety issues. In 2009, the miners’ strike committee warned Eduardo Bours, governor of Sonora, that “a spill that could have very serious consequences, since on April 14 the company withdrew its emergency personnel and with them the union workforce responsible for maintaining the tailings dam, which could put the population below the dam in danger.” The committee got no answer.

Five years later, the predicted spill finally occurred. At one in the morning, Navarette, a leader of the striking union, saw an appeal for help on Facebook from a doctor in Bacanuchi, the first town on the Bacanuchi River below the mine. “We went there right away,” he remembers. “The townspeople, even the children, were all crying. No one knew what could be done. Even Gila monster lizards and coyotes were fleeing from the danger.”

The strikers became the primary source of information for the affected towns, he says. “We always worried conditions in the mine could affect the communities. We began to help them organize, because we needed to join forces to get the company to listen.” That was the beginning of the Frente Rio Sonora-the Sonora River Front.

Today, the Front is headed by Marco Antonio Garcia, a farmer and former union miner from Baviacora. Garcia, whose deeply lined face shows the impact of a life working in the high desert, farms 75 acres-more than most local farmers, who cultivate just a few. When the farmers had to throw away their crops because of the contamination, he lost $33,000.  

It wasn’t just personal loss that pushed him into action. “If we don’t win, we’re lost,” he says, “and the most important thing people on the Rio Sonora will lose is their dignity.

“The Frente was organized at the urging of Seccion 65 in Cananea,” he continues. “They began visiting all the towns along the river. They had their problem with the scrapping of their union contract, and we had our problem with the river. At first, some people said the miners spent all their time fighting. But in reality, they’re involved in a big struggle. And so are we, if we want to have a future for the people of the Rio Sonora. The contamination of the river is going to last a lifetime.”

Protests first broke out in Ures, a month after the spill. “We started marching and blocking the highway,” recalls Lupita Poom, who now heads the Frente there. “These were all peaceful demonstrations, and hundreds of people took part. That’s when we began to meet the leaders from other towns on the river.” And as Navarette and other miners from Seccion 65 helped local groups get started, a bigger plan took shape. “We decided to do another planton [an organized encampment, like Occupy Wall Street], but this one directed at the mine,” Poom says.  

Martha Agupira says that when the miners came to Tahuichopa to invite people to the protest, “the municipal president told us that soldiers would come, and we’d be thrown in jail. But by then we had nothing, so why not go?”