the publicity stunt; when a prominent newspaper reporter ran an article critical of his qualifications to run a state, Brinkley sent him a goat. His campaign was conducted as an independent write-in candidate, because he waited to declare his candidacy until September, after the ballots had already been printed. Three days before the election, the Kansas attorney general (who had prosecuted Brinkley before the medical board) announced that the rules surrounding write-in candidates had changed, and that the doctor's name could only be written in one specific way for the vote to count (as J. R. Brinkley). As a write-in candidate, he received more than 180,000 votes (29.5 percent of the vote) and lost to Harry Hines Woodring, later Secretary of War in the cabinet of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. An article published at the time in The Des Moines Register estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 ballots were disqualified in this manner. Woodring later admitted that had those votes counted, Brinkley would have won. Brinkley ran again in 1932 as an Independent, receiving 244,607 votes (30.6 percent of the vote), losing to Republican Alf Landon, later Republican nominee for President in 1936. His prospects for success in Kansas destroyed, Brinkley sold KFKB to an insurance company and decided to move closer to the Mexican border, where he could operate a high-power radio station with impunity. Though he could no longer practice medicine in Kansas, he kept his Milford clinic open and put two of his protégés in charge. Wooed by the prospect of being a big fish in a very small pond, Brinkley relocated to Del Rio, Texas, which lay just across a bridge from Mexico. Later in the decade, Brinkley became a Nazi sympathizer. Brinkley and radio The Mexican government, eager to get even with its northern neighbors for dividing up North America's radio frequencies without giving any to Mexico, granted Brinkley a 50,000-watt radio license and construction began on XER, his new "border blaster" across the bridge from Del Rio in Villa Acuña, Coahuila (since renamed Ciudad Acuña). As construction got underway, Fishbein and the U.S. State Department desperately searched for a way to shut Brinkley down. Under heavy pressure from the State Department, the Mexican government halted construction on XER, but it was only temporary. Within weeks, construction resumed and soon two towers reached into the sky. XER, at 840 kilohertz on the AM dial, radiated