| Show THE BEAVER ELECTION TIIE THE ministerial ACTS OF THE BOARD TH THE E FACTS INTHE IN THE dhe CASE BEAVER 1 1 august 28 1880 editors deseret jeisi news the election recently held in this county being an event of or peculiar and special importance justifies me in asking the use of your columns for the purpose of placing before the public a full and fair statement in relation to it having gleaned information and secured important facts from the records from the officials I 1 and from eye witness witnesses os of the manner in which the polling was con ducted in the several precincts bo so farl fari far oar I 1 believe but little else has reached the country than charges of fraud on both sides with a general denial and brief statement of de pense on the part of if at dt least one of the opposing parties the clerk of the county court mr wm fotheringham and anu selee aman mcknight of minersville Miners ville cu comprised M ris rig the board ard of canvas canvassers ers re required qu vi red ned by law that they were actuated by the single desire to follow the provisions of the statutes cannot in view of the plain letter and spirit af the law as it stands be successfully con trover ted it is claimed by the lib eral element that the abe duties of the canvassed can in the thep es are plainly ministerial which is not deni denied edy and that they exceeded their authority by acting judicially in rejecting certain returns this is denied the basis upon which such denial rests is as plain broad and substantial as ay abtin anything tIn contained in a legal fegal enactment can be the session laws of 1878 pages 33 and 34 sec 18 require the said board to carefully examine the returns and if no irregularity or discrepancy appear therein affecting the result of the election of any candidate ibey they shall accept gaid gald i aid taid returns return s as correct but if the right of any person voted for for any office is in any way affected then th the e aid paid s board shall shail open the ballot ballots s f from rom ald aid laid precincts and canvass the same mime so far as to determine the rights of the person whose office may be affected afflec ted 11 now the question hinges largely upon the point whether or not the right of any person voted for was affected mccoombs Mr Coombs the candidate for sherill sheriff on the peoples ticket claimed that his h is rights ts were not only affected but set aside by illegal voting in m four precincts and protested against a lorti certificate fi cate of election being issued to hi his c competitor col stokes stoked who oil on the face of the returns had a majority majory what m were ere the board to do ignore coombs objections and decide against the claim of fraud without investigating to have done so would have been to do exactly what the llie liberals charge them with acting judicially having the law before them they were compelled to go behind the returns in order to comply with its provisions and proceeded to do so they showed no partiality and subjected each precinct to the same scrutiny that any other precinct had been subjected to they threw out the entire poll of one precinct adamsville Adams ville where not a solitary liberal vote was cast because one voter whose name had wrongfully but unintentionally been dropped from the great register because of temporary absence had voted his name being added upon his alpe arpe appearance aranco arance and demand of enfranchisement at minersville Miners ville a t leople leopie eo ples pies s majority of about 70 was sacrificed bemuse because two men voted whose names properly enrolled by the assessor had been jeen omitted through a mere clerical error kasnot this action sufficiently min ii tenal to satisfy the demand of the moat n ost ardent Li liberal benfie berlle was waa it not impartial ini enough to satisfy the most exacting claimant of equal rights and was not nol its compliance with law sufficiently technical and substantial for fon almost anybody I 1 presume that if the investigation and subsequent action had ended at this point the lib erald who w would idl have complained could not be found by a first cla ela class elass d detective or luuy luny any other manaut the canvassers knew their duty and went r night right agh t along hewing the chips to de die right and to the left and the tile clamors of lof indig indignation mation matlon and murmurs of revenge began when they arrived at the bran new iown lown ford here ambition had 0 enlea erlea pei pui pul it elf and lind the Libe bibe liberal rals rahn probably in the majority even in a fair election resorted to t u fill n g by m means ean r atlle atile of the swearing in process the coples eo ples party had but one judge of election lection while the liberals had the other two every time a man or wo nan appeared who e name was nut on llie tile books the peoples depre representative tentative objected to anu protested agaisse the reception of hisor his or her vote and on each and every such occasion the vote was i le e ceide by exactly two thirds majority ihs fihs 1 h s bubines was on to the extent extend of 58 votes and milford returned avery decided minor minori y for the peoples tic ketTIe lickei wettie rie board having rejected two precincts where the min minority biltY was on tile the otherine oth eride because of one or two innocently bently illegal vote votes would have acted x judicially decidedly so feo in tile the light of some other events I 1 know of had blud they not sent the railroad town to J join olli oili the other two and when they got to frisco finding ohp th same thing had baci been done on a much larger scale scale they concluded the their ministerial functions by refusing to add the votes that quarter to the county returns it is contended in some quarters that thata a compliance with the spirit ot the statute would have been the means of annulling a number of votes corresponding with the ballots fraudulently cast and no more this is idle talk if not something worse there are no legal means of identifying votes when once placed in the box and unless the precise votes which which were cast in opposition to law could be separated from the legal ones it is easy to perceive how by the indiscriminate rejection of a given number of votes the innocent could bo be made to sustain gotses for the wrong doing of the guilty more than this it rt is within the pale of possibility for every vote thus thrown out to be one that was legally cast in any event the perpetrators of the wrongs could not by any possibility lose anything so that we find neither justice equity nor wisdom in any such suggestion it is true that the innocent suffered with the guilty in the action of the board but there was no other certain method by which the wrong could be prevented from counting for the ri right 1 an and d vice versa there was no oth other 1 r plan to reestablish the purity and legality of an election which disregard of law had bad defiled and disgraced the result showed the correctness of the canvas canvassers judgment in the establishment lish ment of mr coombs claim it demonstrated their impartiality throughout and tho thoe e whose o ostensible ground of complaint is that all the votes were rejected where only a part of them should have hava been but whose real grievance is that they remain represented uri uli in the list of county officials have only themselves to blame let them re register reister ister lster and yote vote as the law requires and d there will be no opportunity for counting out or in I 1 n no such thing is desired in any quarter but law is law and obeyed even if it should be the means cf ef defea defeating every candidate on both sides V ve had a system of voting once by which fraudulent hillois could be detected and the liberals clamored for secrecy in the exercise of the franchise they have got it and find themselves once more hoist by their own petard petard respectfully S A KENNER |
