As Bad As The 1904 Election In Colorado? by Ed Quillen

Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.

Tuesday, November 02, 2004 — 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, General 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 1887-1889 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 votes to 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 November 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 gubernatorial election. The Republicans focused on the Big Mitt, while ignoring GOP swindles in the hinterlands.

Based on the first counts of 1904 ballots, Adams was sworn in on January 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.

Ed Quillen of Salida, Colorado, ed@cozine.com is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday in the Denver Post.

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Last modified 6/14/09