Lodge Bill

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Lodge Bill or Federal Elections Bill or Lodge Force Bill of 1890 was a bill drafted by Representative Henry Cabot Lodge (R) of Massachusetts, and sponsored in the Senate by George Frisbie Hoar; it was endorsed by President Benjamin Harrison. The bill would have allowed the federal government to ensure that elections were fair. In particular, it would have allowed federal circuit courts (after being petitioned by a small amount of citizens from any district) to appoint federal supervisors of congressional elections. Said supervisors would have been in charge of many duties, including: attending elections, inspecting registration lists, verifying doubtful voter information, administering oaths to challenged voters, stopping illegal aliens from voting, and certifying the vote count.[1]

The bill was created primarily to guarantee blacks, predominantly Republican at the time, the right to vote in the south. The Fifteenth Amendment already formally guaranteed that right, but white Southern Democrats had found loopholes to effectively prevent blacks from voting. The bill was successfully filibustered in the Senate, without much action by the President of the Senate, Vice President Levi P. Morton, while Silver Republicans in the West traded it away for Southern support of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.[2]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Alexander Keyssar, "The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States," Basic Books, 2000 p. 86.
  2. ↑ Wendy Hazard, "Thomas Brackett Reed, Civil Rights, and the Fight for Fair Elections," Maine History, March 2004, Vol. 42 Issue 1, pp 1–23
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.