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Just about anywhere you look, you can find dire predictions that Colorado could become the Florida of 2004. The senatorial and presidential elections are expected to be close, and there are worries about multiple voter registrations, provisional ballots, felons voting, absentee ballots, voter challenges and legal challenges, among other things.
Even with all those possibilities, though, we would have to work at it to hold a worse election than Colorado conducted a century ago.
In the general election of 1904, Republican Theodore Roosevelt easily earned Colorado's five electoral votes with 55.3 percent of the popular vote.
But the gubernatorial outcome was not nearly as clear (Colorado governors were then elected to two-year terms; the modern four-year term did not arrive until 1958.)
Republican James T. Peabody, a Cañon City merchant, banker and public official, was elected in 1902 on a law-and-order platform. But his term featured plenty of chaos and disorder, thanks to a 1903 strike by the Western Federation of Miners in the Cripple Creek District. Peabody declared martial law and sent in the militia, which rounded up miners for deportation when it wasn't storming newspaper offices.
As is often the case when the government claims to be
protecting the public from terrorists, scores of men were
arrested and held without formal charges. In response to
demands that the Constitution be honored, Gen. Sherman Bell
of the Colorado National Guard said, Habeas Corpus,
hell! We'll give 'em post mortems.
Peabody ran for re-election in 1904. He was opposed by Democrat Alva Adams, a Pueblo merchant who had already served as governor twice before, in 1887-89 and 1897-1899. Adams promoted arbitration, rather than warfare, as a way to settle labor disputes.
At first it appeared that Adams had won,
123,092-113,754, and that Democrats had also gained control
of the state senate. However, most of the Democratic senate
margin came from Denver, which then elected all its state
senators at large. Denver totals were suspect, since the
city was run by Robert Speer's political machine, the
Big Mitt.
A vote sold for $2, and the Big Mitt cast at
least 7,000 fake votes in 1904.
On Nov. 12, a few days after the election, Peabody
charged fraud in the Denver count, and the state supreme
court agreed with him. As recounted in the first volume of
Phil Goodstein's wonderful history, Denver from the
Bottom Up,
the court ignored a lot of other 1904 voting
fraud:
Some company-dominated, union-free coal mining camps
in the southern part of the state reported only Republican
votes. In Las Animas and Huerfano counties, mine
superintendents frequently served as Republican precinct
leaders and election judges. They used company payrolls to
register all the workers, citizens and aliens alike. Having
done so, they cast all of the ballots of their miners for
the Republican Party.
As matters developed, the state supreme court and the state board of canvassers (all Republicans) found so much Big Mitt fraud in Denver that the Republicans ended up in control of the state senate, and thus in charge of investigating the gubernatoral election. The Republicans focused on the Big Mitt, while ignoring GOP swindles in the hinterlands.
Based in the first counts of 1904 ballots, Adams was sworn in on Jan. 9, 1905. The legislature, now with a Republican majority in both houses, appointed a commission to examine the 1904 returns, and found plenty of Democratic fraud. For instance, a rooming house on Larimer Street with 25 units had produced 170 voters, and one voter had personally cast 169 ballots.
A majority of the legislative commission reported that Peabody had actually won the election, even if Adams was in the governor's office. On March 16, 1905, the legislature declared that Peabody had won 113,151 to 110,871.
Adams was removed from office, and Peabody was sworn in. The next day, as part of a backroom deal, Peabody resigned. The lieutenant governor, Jesse MacDonald, was sworn in, thereby giving Colorado a unique distinction among American states -- three governors in one 24-hour period.
Come what may today, it's hard to imagine how Colorado could conduct a worse election than it did in 1904 -- although with modern technology, all sorts of things are possible now that weren't possible a century ago.
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