When Your Great-Grandfather Gets Accused of Electoral Fraud

When Your Great-Grandfather Gets Accused of Electoral Fraud

My great-grandfather (holding gavel) with a mariachi band in the Connecticut House of Representatives.

I never met my mom’s maternal grandfather, Frederick Buckley. Born in 1893, he would have had to have lived more than a hundred years to even witness my birth, and would have had to have lived to be around 110 if I were to have any lasting memory of him.

This didn’t stop my curiosity, though. I learned that he had served in the First World War, was prominent in the city of Norwalk, Connecticut, and that he had once represented the city in the state House of Representatives; that was a major source of pride for me. While I have long automatically distrusted politicians, I have enormous respect for those who (seem to) serve in politics to actually help others. Upon hearing that my great-grandfather had once served, I knew I had to learn more.

For a long time, the only prominent story I’d learned was that he had once hired a mariachi band to come play inside the chamber, for reasons on which I’m still not entirely clear.

My grandmother also tells of a time when one of his fellow legislators put some baby chickens inside of his desk as a prank near the end of his term. (She was barely old enough to remember, but sometimes she would come with him to Hartford and sit in the gallery above the chamber.)

The first piece of outside-the-family news information I uncovered was his listing on the Wikipedia page “List of members of the Connecticut General Assembly from Norwalk,” where, next to his name, it is noted that he was “Unseated by Republican in contested election (1943).” Unfortunately, the reference website used by the article was no longer online, so, for the time, that remained a mystery that no one in my family could answer.

Later, when doing more research on him, I came across a New York Times article, published on January 23, 1943, with this headline:

VOTE FRAUDS ARE LAID TO SEVEN IN NORWALK; State Representative Buckley Is Among Those Accused.

Oh shit.

According to the short article, the day before, “State’s Attorney Lorin W. Wallis applied today … for bench warrants to arrest State Representative Fred W. Buckley and six other Norwalk residents on charges of violating the absentee ballot law in the Nov. 3 election.” All but one of the seven were Democrats; there was one Republican in the mix.

This was starting to sound frighteningly modern, especially when it was revealed that a state official had “inquired into alleged irregularities in the Norwalk election. The Republicans challenged 1,500 absentee ballots cast for Democratic candidates.” Apparently, “absentee ballots had been obtained and cast for voters who were not out of the State on Election Day.”

The article ends without saying what ended up happening; it had been relegated to page 28, and its brevity indicates it wasn’t a major story, from the paper’s point of view.

But it wasn’t over for me, of course.

Further research into my great-grandfather’s electoral history led me to the official Connecticut election-history website, where I found his election record. Based on that source, he won in both 1940 and 1942, and thus was eventually seated in 1943.

I trust the official Connecticut record over a no-longer-consultable website cited by Wikipedia, but it still hasn’t put to bed all of the questions I have. Why was he accused in the first place? Was someone trying to sabotage the elections or change the result after the fact? Was this a 1940s example of the Republican Party as a whole, who controlled the Connecticut House at the time, trying to cancel a legitimate election to further their own power and silence dissenting voices?

Further research has not yielded any additional information about these events. Their eerie resonance with the political climate of the last decade, however, made this a must-write article. I felt it necessary to record this for posterity, but I also find it instructive to see how history at times doesn’t exactly repeat, but, to quote a clichéd phrase, it does rhyme.

This particular time, the rhyme rings very close to home.