(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) As gaslighting left-wingers issue their perennial denials of election malfeasance ahead of the November midterm elections (and with recent California primaries already facing scrutiny), Daily Wire host Michael Knowles offered a thorough historical overview of just how long Democrats have relied on such tactics.

“Despite claims of perfectly secure elections, hundreds of Democrats over American history have been convicted of election fraud — and those convictions represent only a small percentage of cases, which represent only a small percentage of allegations of voter fraud widely acknowledged by historians and, really, by anyone with eyes,” Knowles said.

He was responding to the dubious primary comeback of Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, who succeeded in knocking Republican Spencer Pratt off the November ballot after five days of continuing to collect and count post-election mail-in ballots.

The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud.

When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized. https://t.co/mVskXMLcNi

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 7, 2026

The push to defraud voters with mass mail-in initiatives first picked up steam following the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and it was successfully implemented en masse during the 2020 election, on the pretense that temporary measures were needed to accommodate pandemic restrictions.

But Democrats in many blue states, led by California, have only doubled down since then, demanding that fewer and fewer safeguards be in place to assure election integrity, transparency or accountability.

As Knowles observed, the impetus to cheat is practically stitched into the very fabric of Democratic party politics.

“The Democratic Party was founded in 1828,” Knowles began. “Shortly thereafter, party apparatuses such as Tammany Hall institutionalized election theft by stuffing ballot boxes, repeat voting, casting ballots for dead people, bribery, intimidation, absentee ballots, ballot harvesting and importing voters from outside areas.”

He cited an 1868 audit of a New York City election that found 16% of all votes were fraudulent ones cast by the city’s Democratic machine under notorious party leader William “Boss” Tweed.

The corrupt Democrat politics that dominated major cities like New York, Boston and Chicago throughout the 19th and 20th centuries are widely documented. However, leftist historians now insist that the party underwent a sort of renaissance in the eras of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Civil Rights movement, when Democrats finally repudiated their unsavory affiliations with organizations like New York’s Tammany Hall and the Ku Klux Klan in the South.

Knowles noted that, contrary to that common perception, some of the most audacious election thefts were those perpetrated by none other than Lyndon B. Johnson, who manipulated his way from the Texas Senate to Congress and into the vice presidency (with some, like Roger Stone, strongly maintaining he helped engineer his way into the presidency through the John F. Kennedy assassination).

“In 1948, Lyndon Johnson infamously stole a Texas Senate seat thanks to the drop of 202 late votes in ballot box 13, giving LBJ an 87-vote victory,” Knowles recalled. “That brazen election theft made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ultimately didn’t want to get involved and washed its hands of the matter.”

Johnson’s unholy alliance with black community leaders, who may have been under the influence of the Soviet Union, helped usher in Democrats’ current era of identity politics, even as Johnson himself reportedly declared in private, “I’ll have those n****rs voting Democratic for 200 years.”

Yet, pandering to black voters still was not enough to grant Democrats the sort of political dominance they sought. In fact, after Johnson left office, Democrats won only one of the next six presidential election cycles, with Jimmy Carter riding the coattails of Watergate-era cynicism in 1976.

Even when the charismatic Bill Clinton broke the curse in 1992, the party continued to fall back on its old ways.

“In 1994, Democrats tried to steal a state Senate seat in Pennsylvania,” Knowles recounted.

“On election day, Republican Bruce Marks led Democrat William Stinson by over 500 votes, but the absentee ballots curiously went overwhelmingly for the Democrat, giving Stinson just enough votes to win overall,” he continued. “In that case, happily, a federal judge found that Philadelphia election officials had illegally delivered hundreds of absentee ballot packets directly to the Democrats, who in turn collected votes from people who were ineligible to cast votes when they weren’t forging the votes outright.”

Knowles cited another example using the “same absentee ballot playbook” in an Indiana mayoral race that occurred in 2003, which prompted intervention from the state Supreme Court.

He noted that widespread fraud, such as illegal ballot harvesting, in states like Illinois, Arkansas and Georgia had led to multiple indictments, including a 1982 Illinois race that resulted in 58 convictions of campaign workers and election officials.

“In Chicago alone, a grand jury found that 100,000 fraudulent votes had been cast,” Knowles said.

“But Chicago had already been a central hub of Democrat election theft for decades,” he added, citing the 1960 election in which the Kennedy family is suspected of having used Mafia ties to stuff the ballot boxes, according to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Knowles cited biographer Robert Dallek, who likewise concluded that Democrats “probably stole Illinois from Nixon.”

Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.