Who was the rightful winner of the 1960 election?

[Schmitz in 1972]

This election is often portrayed as if it came down to a margin of approximately 9,000 in IL (BTW, I've heard there was substantial fraud downstate in favor of Nixon!). This is just not the case, even winning Illinois Nixon needs another large state to come out on top. Texas is often the state mentioned although the margin of 46,000 looks almost too solid to be swung in the other direction in the absence of fraud.  The only outright fraud in the 1960 election was Hawai'i. Nixon's electors had been certified, had voted, and had sent the results to Washington when the Democrats decided that Kennedy had actually won and sent surrogate results to Washington. Under pressure from Hawai'i's 2 Democratic senators, Nixon counted the certificate for Kennedy during the electoral vote count. In Bush v. Gore one of the liberals cited this in their opinion as an example of how the deadline for seating electors doesn't matter.