The U.S. Is Facing the Possibility of a Truly Illegitimate Election

On Election Day, 1888, approximately one hour after the last vote was cast, four masked men burst into a polling place in Plumerville, Arkansas. Waving pistols and shouting threats, they forced election officials against a wall, seized the ballot box, and disappeared on horseback into the rainy night.

There was nothing random about the heist. Plumerville was a Republican stronghold, a mostly Black town in a mostly white county. The gunmen, all white, were prominent local Democrats, including a deputy sheriff. According to later court testimony, after taking the ballot box, the robbers rode to the nearby Democratic stronghold of Morrilton and burned their prize in a woodstove. When ballots were finally counted, Plumerville’s were not among them. Not long after, the Democratic candidate was declared the winner of Arkansas’s Second Congressional District—which included Plumerville—by just two-tenths of a percent.

A tale of pistol-wielding,