Twisted things being done in our elections goes back to Tammany Hall. If you know where to look in American history it's not hard to find credible instances of important elections having substantial amounts of fraud. Why do people believe that when the chips are down and vast amounts of money and power are at stake that people are simply going to play fair? Especially when the players are some of the most ruthless, narcissistic, and sociopathic people in America?
>The validity of the runoff election was challenged before the US Supreme Court due to allegations of election fraud, and in later years, testimony by parties involved indicated that widespread fraud occurred and that friendly political machines[3] produced the fraudulent votes needed for Johnson to have a numerical majority, in effect stealing the election.
> Some, including Republican legislators and journalists, believed that Kennedy benefited from vote fraud from Mayor Richard Daley's powerful Chicago political machine. [12] Mayor Daley’s machine was known for "delivering whopping Democratic tallies by fair means and foul."[13] Republicans tried and failed to overturn the results at the time—as well as in ten other states.[13] Some journalists also later claimed that mobster Sam Giancana and his Chicago crime syndicate "played a role" in Kennedy's victory. [13] Nixon's campaign staff urged him to pursue recounts and challenge the validity of Kennedy's victory, however, Nixon gave a speech three days after the election stating that he would not contest the election.[14]
This "Chicago political machine" was later shown to have committed voter fraud in 1982. 26 people were convicted[1], and here's the grand jury report[2]. They had been getting away with it, until they didn't.
Fortunately, as media reassure us, today voting fraud simply cannot happen: you'd need a whole conspiracy of dozens of people, a real, as one could call it, machine.
Okay, here’s a non-media non-partisan source. What I’m linking to was written in 2007. This seems prescient:
In the aftermath of a close election, losing candidates are often quick to blame voter fraud for the results. Legislators cite voter fraud as justification for various new restrictions on the exercise of the franchise. And pundits trot out the same few anecdotes time and again as proof that a wave of fraud is imminent.
You don't need to. In the US you can lose the nation by 3 million votes as long as you win 3-4 swing states in the presidential or senate vote -- be it your brother making 538 votes disappear or your staffers creating 203 ballots with your name on it...
It’s really really difficult to do either of those things, especially in vote by mail. In Washington, for instance, I can see who is registered, who voted in a given election, and match that to the vote totals.
I live in Washington state. There is someone registered to vote on my street who has voted, consistently, since 2012 - The year the resident by that name moved out. We have raised the issue to the Secretary of State’s office, and they have sent out a mailer for the resident to confirm their address.
turnout is always < 1.00 in the US because voting is not mandatory and registration is not (universally on a national level) automatic—which would need to happen before mandatory voting.
so it is theoretically trivial, once you know how many votes you needed to have won that you did not, to add a number of fake votes N to the number of real votes P such that N+P < T, the total of registered voters.
however, this is actually not that easy to do en masse scale because of how discretely elections are conducted. people in the US generally vote by precinct (determined at the local level by the county board of elections) which is about the size of a census tract, which is a relatively small area. it is basically impossible to know ahead of time which specific precincts you need to flip in order to change the result in a credible way. injecting the ballots into the process would require a level of sophistication that interacting with the county election officials or volunteer election administrators would lead you to believe is not possible.
the actual way to do election fraud would be to just report vote totals that have no basis in fact. which, sure, i guess is also possible. but then, while Democrats control the urban centers so may have more registered eligible voters who do not vote to be able to fake vote totals within their cities, Republicans control the vast majority of counties in the country. so at scale, effective use of this strategy would just result in everyone reporting 100% turnout every year...which clearly doesn’t happen.
the fact that any arms race here would rapidly devolve into a situation neither side can accurately predict means that election fraud at scale not only does not occur, but also that is is actually not preferable. it is way easier to play in other margins (make it harder for people to register, kick people off voter rolls, etc).
3-4 swing states is still a national level. You're also talking about 20k-100k type numbers. This isn't someone winning by 100 votes.
What's funny about this situation is that Biden is on track to win most of these states by a larger margin than Trump did against Clinton. She did ask for a recount, but I don't remember her ever going on and on about fraud.
The big difference is that it's been clearly shown that Russia did interfere [1]. The arguable point is did Trump's campaign know and direct the interference?
And if we're really talking about shaping elections, disinformation and voter suppression is the way to get it done. Once votes are cast, it's too hard to move enough in order to have any meaningful change. There are too many checks, rechecks, and processes in place to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election.
Russia has been meddling in our elections since the Cold War began[1]. China, Israel, and every other power "interferes" in our elections, too, just like we do to them.
What was disingenuous of the US media was to make a huge deal out of 2016 shenanigans by Russia without any context, making it appear to the average voter that it was both significant and unique, neither of which is true.
The intel community and major media spent 3 years and tens of millions of dollars looking for something illegal or even unethical that the Trump campaign did related to Russia, and nothing was found.
The idea that there are "too many checks, rechecks, processes ... to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election" is absurd in the US where the whole national election can be determined at the end by a single large county in one swing state, as happened in 2000. Now realize that 45 states were required to haphazardly design and implement, in 3 months, a mail-in voting system on a scale with which they had no experience, we'd expect a lot of errors that aren't even malicious.
Add in a flurry of state governments quickly passing various laws to swing things to their favor as happened in all the swing states, and you have a recipe for disaster as we're seeing.
Might have something to do with all the provable connections to Russia the Trump campaign had. People are sitting in jail for lying about contacts with Russia.
You really can't pretend these are similar situations.
And it's also a huge difference between undermining the entire process vs claiming that Russia conducted psyops on American voters in favor of Trump.
Trump is saying you cannot trust the vote counting. That's a big deal.
Which of course didn’t happen hear - Biden is on track to win by a clear electoral and popular margin. Florida in 2000 was decided by hundreds of votes though.
People are being willfully obtuse when they say the kind of fraud being alleged isn't possible. A certain political party spent that last six months forcing rule changes on swing states vis a vis mail in voting that you can't compare this year's election to any that came before.
Most of the fraud allegations (at least the ones where the numbers would be large enough to make a significant difference) revolve around these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.
And please, kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers) and blocking their ability to observe and inspect ballots might not prove fraud took place, but it does prove criminal intent in my eyes, and the eyes of millions of other Americans.
I believe there was one where GOP poll watchers were barred from entry - because there were already GOP poll watchers in the room and the room was at capacity.
> these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.
Many states added new procedures like these to this election, but I don't believe any state added procedures that weren't already used in one or more other states.
- Despite the scope of this fraud, it didn't alter the election outcome.
- The bi-partisan checks and balances failed because the Republican party had insufficient strength in the areas of Chicago where the fraud occurred.
- They got caught.
- This was 40 years ago. It was novel for the FBI to use computers at the time to detect irregularities.
In the states that Trump is currently contesting, the GOP controls either the legislature or the legislature and the Governorship. The GOP isn't going to let any precincts go unwatched in these states.
Fraud isn't impossible, it's just impossible at a scale to change an election outcome and get away with it, especially the presidential election.
One thing I find interesting is that one of the measures the GOP regularly calls for, voter IDs, wouldn't have prevented the fraud that occurred in Chicago in 1982. Meanwhile, the sorts of measures that would've prevented that fraud (bi-partisan administration of the voting process) don't suppress the vote.
Fortunately, as media reassure us, today voting fraud simply cannot happen: you'd need a whole conspiracy of dozens of people, a real, as one could call it, machine.
This I find impossible to believe.
How hard is it to intercept mail-in ballots, sign them, then mail them in? Who knows that you did so? I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would. And both times alleged that the other side was cheating. So much so that pollsters are engaged with asking how they are so wrong when Trump is on the ballot.
You know the old saw that cheaters always accuse others of cheating? What does that suggest about Trump?
(If it weren’t for massive “cure” efforts by both parties, a shocking number of ballots would be discarded due to errors like DMVs failing to forward registrations to BOEs. In 2016, the NC Democratic Party through cure outreach got provisional ballot acceptance here from 30% to 50% if I remember correctly.)
People would complain they never got their ballots, and mail in ballots are tracked. So a few people complaining they never got their ballots, but their ballots show up as voted, would be a big deal, and we would know it was happening.
Intercepting mail in ballots would be quite difficult and obvious. A far simpler solution would be to simply fill out the request forms that were conveniently mailed out to every voter on the rolls in my state. This led to thousands of households receiving applications for residents that no longer lived at that address
> How hard is it to intercept mail-in ballots, sign them, then mail them in? Who knows that you did so?
Well first of all, the person who was supposed to get the mail-in ballot in the first place. In Michigan, you can check to see whether they've received your mail-in ballot.
Don't you think that if 100k Republicans in Michigan didn't receive their ballot at all, but checked and found that they had been registered as having voted, we'd be hearing about that?
> I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would.
I find this highly suspicious too. In 2016 it might have been the "Shy Tory" effect, but the Trump voters in 2020 didn't seem at all shy to me.
If 50% of the country hates the president (rightly or wrongly) and much of the media argues that he's a bad person, and everyone who supports him are racists, then I could easily see people lying to pollsters.
Like, the shy tory effect comes from a much less polarised election in the UK (the 1992 GE).
That being said, I actually think that it was the likely voter models that messed up this year, given that turnout was so much higher than expected.
> Don't you think that if 100k Republicans in Michigan didn't receive their ballot at all, but checked and found that they had been registered as having voted, we'd be hearing about that?
The most common claim I've been seeing is that dead people are voting Democrat, not that living people's votes were stolen.
1. Halt counting (or at least 'reporting') in critical swing states simultaneously. We all saw this happen.
2. Kick out poll watchers
3. Figure out how many votes your preferred candidate needs.
4. Examine the voter rolls and see who never turned in a ballot.
5. Fill in ballots for those people (and if you're in a rush, don't even bother to vote in any down-ballot races) and mix them in with the legitimate ballots.
If you control a few key urban centers in a few key states - you can definitely pull this off. Given the behavior of the left over the last 4 years, I absolutely believe they did something like the above.
> Given what my extremely biased sources have told me about the behavior of the left over the last 4 years
FTFY
> Kick out poll watchers
Were any poll watchers kicked out? Trump's claim that there weren't poll watchers in Pennsylvania all turned out to be false; their lawyer admitted in court that they actually had 19 observers in the room [1].
EDIT Meanwhile, the graphs in TFA shows that there are "bumps" in the curve, showing that Democratic-leaning counties had lower turnout in the 2016 election. This is consistent with the widespread reports of Republicans trying to suppress the vote in Democratic-leaning areas, of which [2] and [3] are more recent examples.
> I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would.
We'll have to see once the final counting is done, but +/- 3% is within margin of error for most polls.
Polls also seem to have a hard time finding new voters to poll. It's very exciting to see the records numbers of people who voted, many for the first time.
That's not the type of problem that usually happens with postal voting. Intercepting votes like that on a large scale would be indeed hard.
But what people do get caught doing quite regularly and not just in the USA are things like:
1. Going door to door and giving people blank ballots, pressuring people to fill them in, right in front of them. As a 'helpful service'.
2. Dominant members of the families taking the ballots from family members and filling them all in themselves. This gets reported a lot in various ethnic minority areas in the UK, for example, where the father is traditionally dominant.
3. Ballots being destroyed or not delivered in swing areas where certain sub-regions are known to be strongly pro one candidate or another.
It's good to hear that some places let you check if your ballot was received, but almost by definition, for that to work you need a lot of people to do that kind of check and then publicly broadcast their findings. In an environment where social media is suppressing discussion of the possibility of voter fraud and the media is polarised, it's not so clear how people would do that reliably, even if enough checked in the first place. And a lot of places you can't easily check - I know I can't in my elections!
As for Trump accusing others of cheating, conservatives in multiple countries have been talking about the problems of postal vote fraud for a long time. This is not new, they care because when it is uncovered it always seems to be tipping the vote for the left. Trump in particular shouldn't be under suspicion here because he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person, where fraud is much harder to pull off: it's his opponents that strongly encouraged postal voting despite knowing that postal voting is less confidence-inspiring than the ballot box.
> he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person
He also attempted to sabotage the USPS, and cast doubts on mail-in ballots as a whole, with the obvious intent of suppressing opposition voters, and/or having reason to question the election after the fact.
The only party with anything to gain from suppressing voters are the Republicans. Look at the map of states that didn't ratify the 24th amendment. They've repeatedly made false claims of voter fraud, and engaged in voter intimidation and voter suppression.
And just this election, the Republicans put up fraudulent, illegal mail-in ballot drop boxes.
> Trump in particular shouldn't be under suspicion here because he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person, where fraud is much harder to pull off:
That...doesn't follow.
If I was planning massive mail-in voter fraud/sabotage/suppression, I'd probably be overly sensitive to the possibility that my opponent would also do what they could in that direction (or, in the case of unfocussed sabotage efforts, that my voters’ ballotd would be at risk from my own efforts), which would make me more likely to encourage my voters to vote in person, so that only my opponent’s votes would be at risk.
So what you are pointing to, inasmuch as it says anything relevant, makes Trump more suspicious, not less.
It is not that I do not trust Psychology Today, but that psychology is a messy subject. The articles in Psychology Today can perhaps give some insight into what is being studied in the field, but omits a vast number of details and nuances that are necessary to interpret study results.
Reliability and validity are notoriously hard to pin down in psychology, and there is no stable model of mind or personality that all people share. In practically every study of psychology, one must critically consider not only the reliability and validity of each and every operational definition, but also be highly skeptical of every measurement and also of the statistical techniques applied to those measurements. We know so much about the physical science compared to so little about psychology because people are "messy" and unique.
Every person has intimate experience with their own mind, and therefore many people consider psychology to be accessible. Unfortunately, this is not true. People do a very poor job of understanding the true nature of themselves, especially with regards to how their minds operate. The hazard with pop psychology is that it encourages people to make judgements on others -- judgements that are not necessarily warranted -- and sometimes leads people to take actions that are not in their or others' best interests.
As an example in the Psychology Today article, the author wrote, "In their recently published paper, Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities, the authors suggest that Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy might be beneficial for obtaining resources." While Ok et al. collected interesting data, performed some interesting analyses, and generally contributed to the scholarly dialog on dark triad personality traits, I would not characterize the paper as "being a nasty person is good for getting resources." Such a statement completely ignores how dark triad personality traits can also contribute to poor outcomes in life.
Even worse, the original paper did not address anything at all about risk analysis for donating to people requesting resources. Yet, the Psychology Today article concludes with "Today, those with dark triad traits might find that the best way to extract rewards is by making a public spectacle of their victimhood and virtue." Is that advice for dark triad people? Is that a warning for altruistic people? Is is a statement about the Internet? Is it a recommendation against donating to people who claim to urgently need help? My point is that the Psychology Today article took a messy subject, left it messy, and suggests the reader walks away more knowledgable.
With the hard sciences it is much easier to home in on the differences between academic papers and what the popular press writes about them. For the soft sciences, it is much more important be critical of the topic of discussion.
Based on what I've seen in online dating in my own experiences and the experiences of others, this is not an effective strategy. In fact I'd say it's a counterproductive strategy. Timing and options are large contributing factors to this.
The largest problem with online dating is that there are no natural filters in place. Dating in meatspace means that oftentimes you mean people in contexts that help pre-screen them and give you an idea what you are dealing with (mutual friends, work, gym, hobby, etc.) Online dating strips that away and forces you to have to evaluate each person in person in order to have any clue if things may actually work out in a relationship. In this case, the important thing is to drive things to the first date and then take it from there.
(Technically I guess this is easier if all you're looking for is sex)
With a large pool of options it means that the entire game of "waiting for a couple of days to signal non-desperation" is a counter productive strategy. People constantly have potential people to meet. If you take too long to respond, it will signal disinterest or that you are ghosting them, and they will simply move on.
Note that none of this means "always make yourself available at all times". That will reek of desperation.
I'd love to hear a discussion of methods to solve the issues with our police and the despair of the inner city that were comprehensive. In the case of Baltimore, these are massive systemic problems that involve not just the police, but also the community as a whole and forces outside the community as well. How can you discuss the problems with police misconduct without talking about the drug war, inner city poverty, stat based policing and the poisonous incentives they create, the lack of stable homes, and so on and so on and so on.
Yes you might be able to solve police misconduct by forcing them to turn on each other and report and aggressively as possible. You probably will utterly destroy any semblance of morale and group cohesion and won't have a functioning police force at the end. Yes, we could ban guns from the population. Except that would not only require a constitutional amendment, but also solve the logistical issues of tracking down guns while simultaneously solving the problem of an armed criminal element who now has a helpless population in a massive country where response times can be 20 mins or longer. Body cams will help, but even if people trust police, how does that solve the problem where being a drug dealer is probably the best opportunity you have in the inner city? And it goes on and on.
It's a similar issue to homelessness. It's a multivariate problem that requires many different targeted approaches to deal with the entire thing. People unfortunately tend to focus on their pet issue of choice and ignore the others. Worse yet, political interests often will try to shut down each other from getting funding in order to push their own cause du jour.
Drill rap, the music of Chicago's gangs, is ultra violent and serves as a method of calling out other crews and taunting them into a response. Thanks to Youtube, Soundcloud, and social media the spread of this music is now easier than ever. The threats that come from this music are often followed up on.
Why do they do it? As one rapper says:
“If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?”
“You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.”
Er no. It's not. I'm not saying police conduct in Chicago isn't an issue. I'm saying that the issues of inner city Chicago are much larger than just police conduct. To properly understand the issue you need to consider all the angles.
Yes, but Chicago seems to be a fairly unique place. Also, most of the police shooting incidents don't come out of Chicago. What are you trying to say by pointing out that gang violence is bad in Chicago?
The point that I'm making isn't that gang violence is bad in Chicago. I'm trying inform others why and what drives a significant portion of gang violence in Chicago and show it from the perspective of the people who drive that violence and what they're about.
The parent poster was talking about how gangs become the law and order because of the lack of trust in police. I'm saying the issue is wider and deeper than that. If you read the article, it becomes clear that one of the large driving factors for these rappers is the notoriety and fame they get from doing this is oftentimes the only way they can feel significant. It's a way for them to get money, sex, notoriety. Maybe even a record deal so they can get the hell out of the place they are in. What kind of chances and opportunities does an inner city youth really have?
This notoriety can twist back in its own ways too:
"The guy having the hardest time was Blaze. He seemed to be battling depression. At one point, after a shooting on a corner, he said to me, “Man, I’m so sick of this. I feel like a prisoner in my own neighborhood. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go to my job because I don’t know if the opps will be there to come after me.” He was wallowing in how badly he wanted to be done with the gang life. He told me he wanted to move to California, but his reality felt inescapable to him. He started using PCP at an alarming rate. It was his way of coping. He became difficult to be around. He would stutter and trip over his words. His complexion got bad. His hygiene, too."
It's one hell of a life and not one that I could begin to imagine.
I think I saw a segment on maybe Vice about Chicago. Yes, it is a hell scape. There are a lot of reasons, and some date back to the founding of the country. I think presently, the three big ones are: 1. As a country, we don't take care of our citizens, 2. The only solution we have to our societal everyday type problems is to call the police and let them handle it, 3. Police are trained to be police in the traditional sense, so their go-to method is to be aggressive and arrest people.
It's a downward spiral that has been going on for decades. To make matters worse, policing is delegated to the state and local levels, which aren't under the microscope that the federal government is.
It's also not just a black or minority problem. I say this because I believe many white voters are more complacent because they don't believe they would be affected by it. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong police officer, you aren't immune to disastrous results. White voters shouldn't fool ourselves to believing they are unaffected. Remember blacks get killed disproportionately to the national population, but whites get killed in higher numbers.
The Firewatch devs took a public stand on the Pewdiepie drama and got hit in the head as a result. It went far beyond Twitter harassment and their Steam reviews got bombarded with negative reviews. The hate campaign they got has nothing to do with their development or business practices.
Thanks for providing some context. I don't know what they expected getting involved in YouTube drama (which is essentially like pissing in a sea of piss).
it was also a declaration to "dmca takedown" his content even though permission have very explicitly been given. (this seems like it could be legally problematic, but not sure)... also publicly called for other game developers to participate in similar actions. seemed like some questionable ethics.
> As an empirical matter, I would note that most threads (both here and on simmilar sites, such as reddit) seem to follow a predictable life-cycle. An initial wave of low quality posts gets down voted and gives way to more thoughtful discussion. In less trolly topics, the "low quality" posts are actually ok, but still give way to much higher quality posts through upvotes.
Maybe this is true on HN to some degree, but this is definitely not the case on reddit as a general rule. Here's an observation from an ex-mod of TIA:
At bigger sub sizes, unpopular opinions don't get that little bit of extra breathing time to justify themselves. Instead, the votes come in just too fast; circlejerks rise to the top immediately, while different ideas either get downvoted or simply ignored, languishing at the bottom of the comment section.
You can see this happen on all sorts of different subreddits where people who post thoughtful opinions that go against the current "meta" of the subreddit get down voted viciously no matter how correct they are. For visibility being first and being in tune with what the community wants to hear supersedes being right or being thoughtful. That's not to say that thoughtful and well written posts don't rise to the top. That's to say that the system frequently does not work this way at all. Especially on subreddits where the community is majority polarized in a certain direction.
I think the upvote system is flawed and needs to be evolved into a better system that rewards content based on different metrics. Maybe things like time spent on the page linked, or time spent writing content, or even word count should add subtle multipliers to comments that help promote their visibility.
Low effort content that incites a reaction is a hallmark of the upvote system and currently the only thing that I've seen curtail it is human moderation.
In my opinion the upvote system gained popularity not as anything like an effective means of content ordering (even if that was its original intent) but because it's an effective means of site growth. It turns discussion into a game where you can get, or lose, points and creates an emotional response system not all that dissimilar to the blinking lights of a slot machine.
An interesting thought experiment. Imagine a site like Reddit disabled all external numeric displays of score for a year. You'd only have indirect indicators like order prioritization and apparent visibility based on the number of comments responding to a post. Would usage increase or decrease relative to what it would have otherwise? In my opinion it would not only decrease, but somewhat precipitously. There are a vast number of people that seem to participate almost solely as a means of increasing their score. And even for those not fully addicted to the system, it certainly provides an emotional feedback mechanism. Without this, I do not see these users participating as much - nor do I see a sudden influx of others to replace them. On the other hand, I also imagine this would likely substantially increase overall quality. Like you mention low effort content that incites a reaction is a hallmark of gaming these score systems.
This thread would seem to be a counter-example. The top of the thread looks much better than the bottom. As far as I can tell, this was done entirely without moderator intervention [0]
[0] Dang does have a comment but, if I understand the meaning of [flagged] correctly, it was user downvotes that triggered the killing, and Dang just provided commentary. There is also a perfectly comment marked as [dead], which I assume is a shadow-ban for an unrelated matter.
Not exactly. HN is a community that is relatively small and has a strong culture. This is one of HN's greatest strengths in preventing the same sort of issues that occur in reddit. Larger subreddits show the breakdown of the upvoting system quite dramatically. Subreddits that become heavily polarized also suffer from this. You can see HN having the same problem in heavily contentious topics or flagged posts. This is where the left leaning majority demonstrates it's influence the most. Comment quality hits the skids right off the bat and never really recovers.
Inevitably it is the culture of the posting community and the adherence to that culture that allows for this kind of thoughtful posting to occur. Moderation is a fundamental requirement as well. I've seen many instances in large subreddits that experiment with relying on the upvote system that end in total failure. For a time the community policing works, and then the front page is dominated by low effort content and shit posting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_Senate_elec...
>The validity of the runoff election was challenged before the US Supreme Court due to allegations of election fraud, and in later years, testimony by parties involved indicated that widespread fraud occurred and that friendly political machines[3] produced the fraudulent votes needed for Johnson to have a numerical majority, in effect stealing the election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidentia...
> Some, including Republican legislators and journalists, believed that Kennedy benefited from vote fraud from Mayor Richard Daley's powerful Chicago political machine. [12] Mayor Daley’s machine was known for "delivering whopping Democratic tallies by fair means and foul."[13] Republicans tried and failed to overturn the results at the time—as well as in ten other states.[13] Some journalists also later claimed that mobster Sam Giancana and his Chicago crime syndicate "played a role" in Kennedy's victory. [13] Nixon's campaign staff urged him to pursue recounts and challenge the validity of Kennedy's victory, however, Nixon gave a speech three days after the election stating that he would not contest the election.[14]