The 1927 Liberian Presidential Election Was the Most Fraudulent of All Time

Hey, so, uh, was there some kind of election recently? 

Because we’re looking at social media, and there’s a lot of despair and references to Cheetos, and that’s usually bad news, politically speaking. That means, in the coming days, there’s likely to be talk of voter fraud, somehow from both sides (though let’s be honest, if you’re here, we know which one you’re on). If you’re one of the people talking, rest assured that this is at the very least not the most fraudulent election in history. Yes, that’s a real designation evaluated and awarded by the Guinness Book of World Records, and the honor goes to the Liberian general election of 1927.

At the time, the president of Liberia was Charles D.B. King, a member of the True Whig Party who looked like a West African Jay Gatsby and had the policies to match. His administration was marred by economic blunder after economic blunder, so in 1927, his office was challenged by Thomas J.R. Faulkner of the People’s Party. The battle lines couldn’t be clearer if it was an ‘80s teen movie. Whig, People. Greed, justice. Not exactly a morally gray decision.

And for the vast majority of recorded Liberian voters, it wasn’t a hard decision at all. The overwhelming consensus: Greed is good. When the votes were tallied, King was found to have received 229,527, or a whopping 93.23 percent of the vote, compared to Faulkner’s puny 8,992 votes, bringing him to a dismal 3.77 percent. There was just one problem: There were fewer than 15,000 registered voters in the entire country. They scored an exceedingly impressive 1,590 percent voter turnout.

That could have been a bigger problem: If it turned out that someone — we’re not naming names, we don’t know who — had fabricated 1,490 percent of those votes, it would mean Faulkner had won. As it was, however, it was King in a landslide. This was back when you couldn’t prove anybody did anything if you didn’t have several sworn eyewitnesses who never cheated on their taxes or sweated weirdly, so King enjoyed a third term as president.

For a time, at least. For some reason, Faulkner was quite fed up with King’s shenanigans and accused him of using forced labor on public works projects and selling slaves. When a League of Nations investigations found the accusations to be largely true in 1930, King was forced to resign. Faulkner ran again, only to be defeated by Edwin Barclay, another True Whig. As for King, he became an ambassador to the U.S. and lived a long, comfortable life, never facing any further consequences for his actions in office. 

If this feels resonant somehow, well, take from it what you will. Probably more despair.