Richard LeBert is connected to the Paradice family as the father-in-law of one of Frank Paradice's daughters. Richard kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings on which this account is based.
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| Richard LeBert |
On November 6, 1985, the day after the election, the Times
listed Richard’s re-election as “doubtful,” while a headline in read, “Kindel
Is Elected. Le Bert, the Crestfallen, Concedes Victory of His Adversary.” The
concession had been informal. Some time before noon Richard reportedly told two
attorneys that George J. Kindel of the People’s Taxpayers party led by
103 votes. Not all the precincts had reported, however, and ballot boxes
were still arriving at the courthouse.
At noon Richard left the courthouse for a lunch break,
locking the room in which the ballot boxes had been placed. He instructed the
person whom he had left in charge not to give out any information. He returned
briefly at 2 o’clock but disappeared again. No further returns were made public
in his absence. Around 8 o’clock that evening Richard appeared at the Brown
Palace Hotel and announced that he had been elected. Suspicion immediately
spread among Kindel’s supporters that someone had tampered with the ballots. When
an incensed Kindel appeared at the courthouse wielding a shotgun, the incident made
headlines from San Francisco, California to Buffalo, New York.
From the San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 1895:
CHARGES OF
CROOKEDNESS
A
CANDIDATE AND HIS TRUSTY SHOTGUN
…Crowds soon gathered in the
vicinity of the Courthouse, and George J. Kindel, the candidate whose election
was the chief object of attack, came running to the Courthouse with a shotgun
hung over his shoulder. He is a strong admirer of the Rev. Myron W. Reed, and
was anxious to put into practice the doctrines of that gentleman as delivered
from the pulpit last Sunday. Reed: advocated shotgun law, if any crooked work
was attempted, and Kindel announced himself as the man who would carry the law
into effect. He ran all the way from his store in the lower part of the city
and stopped only long enough to hear the approving remarks of several merchants
who were eager to offer financial assistance.
From the Buffalo, New York Express, November 1895
TROUBLE IN
…At once Kindel… concluded that
the ballots had been tampered with and that he was being defrauded. Thereupon
he seized his shotgun and marched off to the County Clerk's office to put in
execution the Reed maxim of shooting somebody on the spot. Instead of shooting,
he threatened. Then he went off and made a speech to a meeting of women,
whereupon 150 women accompanied him back to the County Clerk's office and
informed the offending [LeBert] that if the returns were altered he would be
lynched. It will be remembered that women are allowed the suffrage in
All of this excitement preceded the official vote count,
which took place several days later. When completed, the count showed that
Richard had prevailed by 108 votes.
Kindel, of course, challenged the result. He claimed to have presented evidence of fraud to the District Attorney, but the District Attorney
ignored his evidence. He requested the appointment of a special prosecutor. The
District Attorney countered that he had considered the evidence, but some of
the witnesses could not be found, and Kindel himself had admitted that one of
the witnesses had sworn a fraudulent affidavit.
No special prosecutor was appointed, but a judge granted
Kindel the right to review the poll books, provided that a deputy be present to
ensure that Kindel and his helper did not abuse the trust. Kindel was ordered to
pay the cost of the deputy, which was $4 per day. Apparently incensed at this
charge, Kindel arrived to conduct the review wearing a large sign that read,
“Don’t bother us. Our time is worth one cent a minute according to the rule of
the county court.” Richard’s friends suggested that the sign amounted to
contempt of court and that Richard’s reporting it to the judge would cause the
case to be closed. There was no need for a formal report, as the Denver newspapers
soundly ridiculed Kindel and his sign. The judge apparently did not take the
incident as contempt of court.
Kindel continued to pursue his challenge of the election
result through the courts, alleging that fraudulent votes had been cast and
that Richard was aware of the fraud. The case came before the county court in
February 1896 but was quickly moved to district court. There it languished with
the plaintiff filing petitions to amend the suit with new evidence and to have
the supreme court intervene because the case had not been assigned properly to
an impartial judge. These petitions were repeatedly denied.
At the same time, a Grand Jury convened to investigate the
accusations of fraudulent voter registrations and other election frauds. The
jury spent two weeks examining the registration books of Arapahoe County. It
concluded that “Le Bert, as far as it knew, did not mutilate the election
returns,” as he had called in judges of the opposite party and opened the
ballots in their presence. They also determined that under the circumstances of
the last election wholesale registration fraud was impossible.
Meanwhile, an outside judge took over the court case of
Kindel versus LeBert. In March, he ruled, “The court cannot go into the ballot
boxes for the purpose of ascertaining that illegal votes have been cast until
there is evidence to show to the court that some party or parties who voted
were not legally entitled to vote.” Upon being refused a continuance, Kindel’s
attorney stated that their complaint was “in an incomplete condition” and he
did not want to go into the ballot boxes under the circumstances. Shortly
thereafter, he rested his case. In the absence of any evidence of voting
irregularities, the judge ruled that Richard LeBert had been duly elected.
Undeterred, Kindel took his case to the supreme court in
September 1896, arguing that the case had been improperly assigned to a district
court judge who was not next in the rotation. He added an argument that Richard
was ineligible to succeed himself as county clerk. The suit did not immediately
go onto the docket and was expected to take several months to decide.
On October 8, 1896, the News reported, “George
Kindel’s Suit Against County Clerk Le Bert Comes to an Abrupt Termination.” The
reason was that the contested ballots had been destroyed by the election judges
in order that they might use the ballot boxes in the upcoming election.
According to the article, Richard followed legal advice and followed the law in
sending out the boxes. Kindel, however, said that the case would proceed
without the ballot boxes and that he had “abundant proofs of crookedness in the
election.”
The case did proceed, but in January 1897 the supreme court
upheld the lower court’s ruling in Richard’s favor. They found that there was
no law governing how cases were assigned to judges and that Richard had
destroyed the contested ballots in compliance with the law. Kindel requested a
rehearing of the case, but the rehearing was denied.
Although the court case had been settled, the controversy
was resurrected briefly with an article in the Denver Post on
September 4, 1897:
BALLOT BOX
Just to show the rottenness of
Denver politics, a ballot box is on exhibition in the window of the business
office of the Post.
The ballot box was found in the
basement of a vacant store room in the down town district, where it had
evidently been placed after it was robbed of its ballots.
A strange feature of this box is
that according to the records it is now on file in the county clerk’s office
and is safely locked in a room set apart especially for that purpose, yet at
the same time it is in the window at The Post. The box is of a kind that is
used only at county elections and is labeled “District F, Precinct 1…”
This article did not mention the contested election.
Two days later the Post published a formal letter
from Richard to the effect that if the Post actually was in possession of a
ballot box, they should return it to the Deputy County Clerk. The letter gave
the Post a second opportunity for accusations. After noting that the box
had been returned as requested, the September 6, 1897 article stated:
The forces in the clerk’s office
assert that this box is one of the “extras” which were sent to District F
during the county election of 1895 and that it was never used… The officials
seem to believe that the box being estray was merely a clerical error.
It will be remembered, however,
that it was the 1895 election about which so much trouble arose. It was in this
contest that the Populists voted for George Kindel for clerk... The election
was supposed to have been fraudulently conducted and Kindel attempted to secure
an order from the court for a recount of the ballots but was overturned at
every point.
There was no apparent fallout from the mysteriously surfacing
ballot box and nothing to support the accusation of stolen ballots. Richard’s scrapbooks contained no further news of the box or the
contested election.
Afterword: When cleaning out the home of Richard's granddaughter after her death - the same home where Richard LeBert spent his final years - his descendants found - a ballot box.
