Shipping Voters Across the Sound: Tacoma's Imported Electorate
An organized scheme ships hundreds of men from Seattle to Tacoma by rail and steamer to register and vote in April's election — and it unravels when 150 would-be voters show up at a dock looking for the man who promised to pay their fare.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
An organized plan to increase the voting population of Tacoma has come to light within the past two days. Several hundred men have been taken from this city since election to Tacoma in order to register and vote at the election which will occur there early in April. These men are taken over both by rail and steamer, but their exit from Seattle just after election and arrival in Tacoma just in time to register are significant facts.
The exodus began about three days ago, immediately after election, when about twenty negroes were taken over on the steamer State of Washington. They had been rustled together by a well-dressed darkey from Tacoma, who remained here to drum up more. Friday night about sixty more men were sent over on the Northern Pacific train, and yesterday's train took over forty more. The scheme leaked out through the bungling way in which the job was done. Yesterday morning no less than 150 men went down to the Flyer's dock before 7 o'clock, and as the Flyer was about to leave they made inquiries for 'the man who was to pay our way to Tacoma.' The man was nowhere to be seen and the Flyer left without these.
Later in the day some ten or twelve went over on the Flyer, about forty on the State of Washington, and a large crowd, estimated at fifty, on the Multnomah. The identity of the men who are working the colonization scheme is, of course, carefully concealed.
“The scheme leaked out through the bungling way in which the job was done.”
This is machine politics in its rawest form: bodies moved across the water, paid fares promised, and votes harvested in a city where they did not live. The scheme's collapse — for want of a bribe that never materialized at the dock — is a reminder that electoral fraud has always been as sloppy as it is cynical.
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