one. But this year the same Conklin registered in the same district fifty-nine hundred and ninety-three legally qualified voters. Whence the discrepancy? There were about twelve hundred colored voters in the district, swelling the number of legal voters to that extent. But, then, there is still a difference of thirty-one hundred and seventy-two to be accounted for; thirty-one hundred and seventy-two over and above the number registered two years ago. The increase did not result from immigration, for in those counties immigration was notoriously inconsiderable. No, aside from other influences that may have been brought to bear upon him, Conklin was this time not a candidate himself, and, as I heard him declare in a speech, he made it a special object to defeat the Liberal Republican candidate for Congress, Colonel Dyer. And so he registered “liberally” against him.
And now, sir, what does this prove? Simply this: that under such a system the right of citizens to vote was completely at the mercy of any villain who might happen to be appointed a registration officer, and there was no remedy against the grossest of outrages. But the case was, if possible, even worse than that.
Permit me to give you another instance. In 1868 there were in Buchanan county, Missouri, 4,621 persons registered as qualified voters. Before the board of review met, over one thousand affidavits were filed with the members of that board against persons who had taken the prescribed oath and had therefore been registered, and who were afterwards to be disfranchised. When the board of appeals and review met, hundreds of them besieged the door of their meeting place. But the proceedings of that board, limited by law to a very few days, were remarkably slow. About three hundred cases were considered—about forty favorably, the others unfavorably; the board closed their doors in the faces of the
