winner. This analysis has been challenged, since registered voter figures only counted people who had paid the poll tax,and "veterans and senior citizens and some other isolated groups" were exempt from that tax. Schlesinger and others have pointed out that even if Nixon had carried Illinois, the state would not have given him a victory, as Kennedy would still have won 276 electoral votes, to Nixon's 246. More to the point, Illinois was the site of the most extensive challenge process, which fell short, despite repeated efforts spearheaded by Cook County state's attorney, Benjamin Adamowski, a Republican, who also lost his re-election bid. Despite demonstrating net errors favoring both Nixon and Adamowski (some precincts, 40% in Nixon's case, showed errors favoring them, a factor suggesting error, rather than fraud), the totals found fell short of reversing the results for the candidates. While a Daley-connected circuit judge, Thomas Kluczynski (later appointed a federal judge by Kennedy, at Daley's recommendation), threw out a federal lawsuit "filed to contend" the voting totals, the Republican-dominated State Board of Elections unanimously rejected the challenge to the results. Furthermore, there were signs of possible irregularities in downstate areas controlled by Republicans, which Democrats never seriously pressed, since the Republican challenges went nowhere. More than a month after the election, the Republican National Committee abandoned its Illinois voter fraud claims. An academic study in 1985 later analyzed the ballots of two disputed precincts in Chicago which were subject to a recount. It found that while there was a pattern of miscounting votes to the advantage of Democratic candidates, Nixon suffered less from this than Republicans in other races, and, furthermore, the extrapolated error would only have reduced his Illinois margin from 8,858 votes (the final official total) to just under 8,000. It concluded there was insufficient evidence that he had been cheated out of winning Illinois. A special prosecutor assigned to the case brought charges against 650 people, which did not result in convictions. Three Chicago election workers were convicted of voter fraud in 1962, and served short terms in jail. Mazo, Nixon's conservative reporter friend, later claimed, without evidence, that he "found names of the dead who had voted in Chicago, along with 56 people from one house". He claimed to have found cases of Republican voter fraud in southern Illinois, but said that the totals "did not match the Chicago fraud he found". After Mazo