Elections — Contest — Pleadings — Nature of inquiry — Sufficiency of petition — Identity of persons committing irregular actions — Averment that illegal votes accrued to benefit of respondent — Presumption-Necessity — Fraud — Irregularities.
1. In the contest of election to an office involved in a general election, the intent of the inquiry is not whether the election was undue or illegal but is as to whether the election for the office in contest was undue or illegal. [564-5]
2. A complaint of an undue and illegal election or a false return must be stated with clearness and precision and the petitioners held to due diligence to ascertain and specify the facts which, if sustained by proof, would require the court to set aside the result of the election. [565]
3. While pleading in election contests should not be governed by such strictness as to protect fraud, the acts of sworn officers should not be attacked without adequate and well defined cause. [565]
4. Where such glaring fraud and illegality exist as to make it impossible to purge the ballot boxes with any degree of accuracy, the court may reject the whole vote of any or of several districts. [567]
5. Such action will not be taken, however, in the absence of specification of fundamental fraud as to the contest involved. [567]
6. Where no fraud is shown, mere irregularities in conducting an election, not affecting the result, will not require rejection of the entire vote of the election district. [568]
7. Such irregularities will not void an election even though the election officers may be subject to punishment. [565]
8. The presumption is that the votes recorded for a candidate for office by the return board were legal, and if, in a contest of the election of such candidate, it is proposed to be proved that any of them were illegal, it is essential that the petition contain averments that these illegal votes accrued to the benefit of respondent. [566]
9. A petition for contest of election to an office which was involved in a general election, and to which the respondent was elected according to the official returns which credited him with a plurality of approximately 250, will be quashed where such petition avers that in designated districts upwards of specified numbers of persons voted illegally, and that persons with known affiliations with the party whose candidate the contestant was, were unlawfully refused permission to vote, and avers other irregular acts of the election officials and other persons, but does not set forth the names of the persons involved except in one case, and does not aver that any of the votes fraudulently cast accrued to the benefit of the respondent or were detrimental to the contestant. [561-71]
Argued September 27, 1934.
PER CURIAM, November 26, 1934:
We have examined the record in this case with care, and fail to find any error. The opinion of Judge PATTERSON fully and fairly reviews the facts, and correctly applies and sets forth the governing questions of law. The judgment is affirmed on his opinion.