The "Stolen" 1960 Election

Even though it's been fifty years, the hoary old urban legend about how Mayor Daley dragged dead voters to the polls to skew Chicago's totals, thereby handing the election to Kennedy when Nixon was the real winner, is still around.

Most recently in a letter to the editor of my own local newspaper:

A tribunal of the 9th Circuit ruled that because prisons house a disproportionate number of minorities, prisoners should have the right to vote.
Lost in the reasoning was the fact that, since minorities generally have lower life expectancies than whites, at any given point in time minorities are also disproportionately represented in cemeteries.
Using the same logic, dead people must, therefore, also have the right to vote.
Democrats in particular have long recognized this injustice, and to their credit have taken the lead in ensuring that votes of the deceased are counted.
Let’s not forget that it was dead voters in West Virginia and Illinois who put John F. Kennedy in the White House.
Here in Washington, King County Democrats in particular have been relentless in their pursuit of justice, and as a result, dead voters have tipped the balance in close races in recent years. They have done so again in this election.
Our hats should be off to them. Dead voters have become a powerful Democratic voting bloc, taking their rightful place alongside other powerful Democratic voting blocs such as felons, illegals, Trekkie-conventioners, and noseringed-Americans — all proudly standing up for the rights of the oppressed.

Okay, I'll give the guy points for cleverness. But cleverness is not smartness. Here's my reply:

Here we go again with the so-called "stolen" 1960 election, in which "dead voters" in Illinois swung Chicago and therefore the state of Illinois from Nixon to Kennedy, which in turn allowed JFK to "steal" the election from Richard Nixon. Philip Jones' letter (11-14) says so, and he also throws in a new and previously unidentified "dead voter" state, West Virginia (which went for JFK by a margin of 5.42% -- still close but not close enough to have “dead voters” make a difference).
However, the so-called “dead voter poll fraud” in Illinois, even if it were true, wouldn't have mattered because of the Electoral College: Regardless of popular vote, 269 electoral votes were needed to win. The final count was 303 Kennedy, 219 Nixon; 15 votes went to a segregationist-democrat candidate.
Illinois had a total of only 27 electoral votes and they were not enough to swing the election to Nixon.
Do the math: 269 votes needed to win; switch 27 Illinois votes from Kennedy to Nixon and it’s still Kennedy 276, Nixon 246.
Even if you dubiously throw in West Virginia’s 8 electoral votes, the final tally is Kennedy 266 and Nixon 254; with no one exceeding the 269 vote threshold the contest then goes to the heavily-Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, and Kennedy still wins.
I wish people would do just a little research into their opinions before displaying their ignorance for all to see. Looking up the 1960 election results took me about 6 seconds.

You can check it out for yourselves at Wikipedia's US Presidential Election 1960, Freakonomics' Did Richard Daley Steal the 1960 Election for Kennedy? and Slate's Was Nixon Robbed?