And then there was Nichols, the link between the Nixon campaign and the backroom expertise of the FBI. Most of his energies went into campaign security, known euphemistically as “poll-watching.” In October, he helped to recruit a hundred former FBI agents, along with an alleged hundred thousand “trained volunteers,” to run surveillance at polling locations deemed particularly susceptible to anti-Nixon sentiment. Speaking with the press, Nichols insisted that some three million votes would be at stake on Election Day due to Democratic “miscounting, ballot tampering and ‘ghost’ voting.” Some
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