Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 21, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 February 1900 — The Kentucky Cheating. [ARTICLE]

The Kentucky Cheating.

Whatever shapes event in Kentucky may the people of the United States will not lose sight of the main point. This is the Democratic attempt to subvert the will of voters as fully declared at the polls. The successive stages of the conspiracy are clearly developed. First, a majority of Democrats was placed on each election board, county and State. They managed the polls and returns in their own way. But the Republican plurality was too large to be destroyed. Taylor was inaugurated and then the plot went forward in the Legislature. Members were turned out to make room for fresh conspirators. The boards of contest, alleged to be drawn by lot, were somehow made Democratic by ten to one. During the excitement attending a mysterious murder the boards of contest suddenly shut out the defense, and a fragment of the Legislature decreed who should be Governor, going through the operation twice, because, in their haste, they had overlooked not only the constitution of the State, but the infamous Goebel law itself. The conspirators against the dearest rights of America freeman should halt instantly says the Globe-Democrat. Let there be no tricks by a piece of a Legislature to go on wiih the scheme to put in the Governor’s office a man who received at the polls a minority of votes. Whatever a legislative junta may do, the fact remains that an American citizen has a right to cast one vote and have it honestly counted. When this right is struck down and the citizen submitsto’the black crime*, the supremacy of the people is at an end. Assassins of American liberty will find that the constitution of the United States guarantees to each State a republican form of government. Against this final barrier the elaborately contrived Goebel law to cheat the will of the people will be dashed aside, and when the ballot is respected in Kentucky the dark threat of .civil war will disappear. (