These 155 delegates have come together under a common cause. They’re here for election security.
This is the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention, but the rhetoric might sound familiar to 21st century ears.
“There is no higher duty resting upon us, as citizens and as delegates, than that which requires us to embody in the fundamental law such provisions as will enable us to protect the sanctity of the ballot,” John Knox, a lawyer from Anniston, says after being chosen the body’s chairman.
For decades cheating at the ballot box had undermined the legitimacy of state government and tempted the familiar specter looming over Alabama politics — federal intervention.
Reuben Kolb wasn’t wrong when he said he’d won the governor’s race. His victory really was stolen.
And these are the men who took it from him.
The election fraud they claim they want to stop is their own.
In 1874, violent voter suppression and blatant election rigging unseated the Reconstruction Republicans and returned white Democrats to office in Alabama and throughout much of the South. With this reclaimed power, the South brokered an end to the federal oversight of Reconstruction in 1877.
At first, Black voting fell sharply, especially in the Black Belt, the fertile region where plantations had flourished and Black people outnumbered whites, in some places three-to-one.
In an 1874 city election, about 1,200 Black voters cast ballots in Eufaula, Ala.
In the 1876 presidential election, that number fell to 10.
But then something curious began to happen. Black people in the Black Belt started to vote again — at least on paper — but not for the party of Lincoln. This time they cast their ballots for the white Democrats favored by their former enslavers.
This wasn’t some early struggle for voting rights. Rather, Black Belt planters built an elaborate scheme that gave them control of Alabama.
They called it “the magnificent system.” This fraud is no secret. In fact, several delegates at the 1901 convention speak of it proudly — in the open and on the record. On the old House floor, a Perry County delegate, Charles Greer brags about it with the over-the-top flourish of a carnival barker.
“It is an art, gentlemen, learned only by experience, one fraught with danger—a ‘magnificent system’ that cannot be inherited or perpetuated,” Greer says. “It is an achievement of faith with the evidence not seen. It is Christianity, but not orthodox. It is prime but humane. It is wrong but right.”
In reality, the “magnificent system” is not so mystical. In the Black Belt, they stuff ballot boxes where they can, move voting precincts without warning, and bribe anyone otherwise reluctant to help cheat. Planters threaten the livelihoods of the Black sharecroppers and force them to vote how they want. And if that doesn’t work, they threaten their lives.