THE LOUISVILLE CONTESTED ELECTION CASES Five Republican election officers having been thus successively arrested or beaten into insensibility, the reign of terror was successfully established among the voters in the precinct. No one could be found to serve as republican officer until the cripple who had been arrested, the grandson of a Kentucky Governor and the first cousin of the then Governor of Kentucky, was bailed out and, still unafraid, returned to his post. The other republican officer's place was filled by the Democrats with an imported repeater. Twenty-one illegal registrations were proved in this precinct. The acts of the police were reported to the Mayor of the City by responsible eye-witnesses, but he refused to leave his office to visit the polls or remove the police, and smiling, said to the complainants, "You don't regard that as any important matter; did you bring me down here about that, the mere talk of a mere policeman." And on the day after the election the Mayor called the Chief to his office and complimented him on the good conduct of the policemen under him on election day. In argument the Democrats urged that after the trouble was over and the polls opened every thing was quiet and orderly. Such quiet and order, the result, not of freedom and liberty, but of oppression and the inability to resist, bring to mind the Russian general who, after' he had sup pressed with mailed hand a popular up rising of the Polish patriots, sent a telegram to his home government which read, "Order reigns in Warsaw." The fraud at the registration and the election was as extensive and extraordinary as the violence. Many thousand repeaters and phonies registered and voted fraudu lently. Between registration day and elec tion day the Fusionists published day by day, in an independent newspaper in the city, the entire registration list, containing about 48,000 names and street addresses, and called on all citizens to examine that list and report illegalities. Fraudulent reg
istrations to the number of 1829 were specifically proved. Of these 180 occurred from the houses of policemen and firemen and 348 more from houses adjacent thereto or on the same square. The fraud of the Democratic machine culminated in the Twelfth Ward in certain "moved" or "alphabetical" precincts, so called, and there election thieves were thickest. At midnight the night before election two old Democratic precinct cap tains and their employees hired a wagon and drove from the saloon of the son-in-law of the Chief of Police to the No. 4 Hook and Ladder House of the City Fire Department, where a meeting of all the ward captains had just been held, presided over by the Secre tary of the Fire Department. Here they loaded on to the wagon about a dozen ballot boxes and booths belonging to the Democratic City and County Committee which had been obtained a. few days before on order of the Chairman of that Committee, who was also President of the City Sinking Fund, in violation of his express promise to the County Official charged by law with the distribution of ballot boxes. From mid night until 4 A.M. these industrious citizens drove around and distributed their ballofr boxes in the rear of the izth ward saloons and other places where "fake" elections were held the next day. When election day arrived, nine Democratic clerks, having the custody of the ballots, instead of going to the legal polling places, secretly went to the places where these Democratic primary ballot-boxes had been deposited and stuffed them with ballots. The result was that in Republican precincts such obviously fraudu lent returns were made as 328 to 9 and 257 to 5 and 283 to 9 in favor of the Democrats. In these nine precincts 2770 registered voters were thus entirely disfranchised. These 1 2th Ward election thieves left the proofs of their own felonies behind them in their own handwriting. The registration books contain the names of all registered voters arranged alphabetically, and opposite
