Honest election officers, respecting “the will of the majority” as the sovereign of our nation, would protect honesty in elections, regardless of their own or their party’s views, but unhappily that high standard is not universal.

Surely, the method of taking the vote and of safeguarding the honesty of elections should be the most important and fundamental of all questions in a republic.  Such laws ought to be preliminary to all other laws.  Yet as a matter of fact the laxity and ambiguity of many state election laws and the utter inadequacy of provisions for enforcement are almost unbelievable.  The contemplation of the actual facts seriously reflects upon the intelligence and good faith of the successive lawmakers of our land.

With no one on the election board whose special business it is to see that honesty is upheld, a suffrage amendment must face further hazards through the fact that most states do not permit women, or even special men watchers, to stand guard over the vote and the count upon such questions.

When it is remembered that immigrants may be naturalized after a residence of five years; that when naturalized they automatically become voters by all our state constitutions; that in eight states[A] immigrant voters are not even required to be citizens; that the right to vote is limited by an educational qualification in only seventeen states, and that nine of these are Southern, with special intent to disfranchise the Negro while allowing the illiterate White to vote; that evidence exists to prove that there is an unscrupulous body ready to engage the lowest elements of our population by fraudulent processes to oppose a suffrage amendment; that there is no authority on the election board whose business it is to see that an amendment gets a “square deal”; that the method of preparing the ballot is often a distinct advantage to a corrupt opposition; and that when fraud is committed there is practically no redress provided by election laws, it ought to be clear to all that state constitutional amendments when unsponsored by the dominant political parties which control the election machinery, must run the gauntlet of intolerably unjust and unfair conditions.  When suffragists have been fortunate enough to overcome the obstacles imposed by the constitution of their states and a referendum to the male voters has been secured, they must immediately enter upon the task of surmounting the infinitely greater obstructions of the election law.  They make their appeal to the public upon the supposition that a majority of independent voters is to decide their question.  Instead, they may discover that in a determining number of precincts the taking of the actual vote is a game in which the cards are stacked against them.  One woman, who had watched at a precinct all day in a suffrage amendment election, said “Something went out of me that day which never came back—­and that was pride in my country.  At first I thought