Andrew Malcolm Is Bad At Math, History

I've previously noted Andrew Malcolm's obnoxious suggestions that everything having anything to do with Chicago is inherently corrupt. Here, the Los Angeles Times blogger and former Bush aide reminds us that his commitment to phony Democrat-bashing narratives is greater than his (purely theoretical) commitment to the truth:

In 1960 it was some 9,000 inexplicably tardy votes from Cook County, controlled by William Daley's father, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, that gave John F. Kennedy Illinois' electoral votes that gave Kennedy the White House.

Didn't happen.

Let's start with the obvious: If Kennedy had lost Illinois, he still would have won the 1960 election. With Illinois' 27 electoral votes, Kennedy had 303. Without Illinois, Kennedy would have had 276 electoral votes, still more than the 269 he needed to win. Therefore, Malcolm's statement that it was “Illinois' electoral votes that gave Kennedy the White House” is false.

Nor is there much reason to believe Malcolm's suggestion that Illinois was stolen for Kennedy, as Rutgers professor David Greenberg demonstrated in an October 16, 2000 Slate article:

National GOP officials plunged in. Thruston Morton flew to Chicago to confer with Illinois Republican leaders on strategy, while party Treasurer Meade Alcorn announced Nixon would win the state. With Nixon distancing himself from the effort, the Cook County state's attorney, Benjamin Adamowski, stepped forward to lead the challenge. A Daley antagonist and potential rival for the mayoralty, Adamowski had lost his job to a Democrat by 25,000 votes. The closeness of his defeat entitled him to a recount, which began Nov. 29.

Completed Dec. 9, the recount of 863 precincts showed that the original tally had undercounted Nixon's (and Adamowski's) votes, but only by 943, far from the 4,500 needed to alter the results. In fact, in 40 percent of the rechecked precincts, Nixon's vote was overcounted. Displeased, the Republicans took the case to federal court, only to have a judge dismiss the suits. Still undeterred, they turned to the State Board of Elections, which was composed of four Republicans, including the governor, and one Democrat. Yet the state board, too, unanimously rejected the petition, citing the GOP's failure to provide even a single affidavit on its behalf.

[W]hat's typically left out of the legend is that multiple election boards saw no reason to overturn the results. Neither did state or federal judges. Neither did an Illinois special prosecutor in 1961. And neither have academic inquiries into the Illinois case (both a 1961 study by three University of Chicago professors and more recent research by political scientist Edmund Kallina concluded that whatever fraud existed wasn't substantial enough to alter the election).