There are more opportunities for the casting of fradulent ballots in New Mexico at national elections than there are in any state in the union, according to Clay Tallman, commissioner of the United States general land office, who is in Denver today after completing a tour of that state. He does not assert that plans for fraud have been made, but he does lay emphasis on the conditions which permit of gross irregularities should the desire exist.
“There is no Australian ballot system in that state,” said Commissioner Tallman, “and in some sections of the state it would be easy to control the vote of the whole communities by undue influence. The United States district attorney there should follow the lead of United States Attorney Tedrow of Colorado, who, I am told, is personally in the field ferreting out fraud schemes for election day.”
Commissioner Tallman is a political optimist. After weeks spent in the Dakotas, in Montana, in Wyoming, in Colorado, in New Mexico, in fact in most of the states of the great West, he sees nothing but an overwhelming vote for President Wilson on Nov. 7. The political fever which has taken hold oh him has run his Wilson temperature up to the landslide degree and he laconically says that “there’s nothing to it.”
Take Wyoming, for example. Tallman hit that state on the north, talked to huge audiences and hundreds of individuals and left the state via the southeast border. He said that whole communities are for Wilson, for Kendrick for governor and the whole state Democratic ticket. Even in the sections where the sheep interest control, Commissioner Tallman says that the railroad men’s vote will offset the Hughes strongholds.
“In New Mexico the election of A. A. Jones as United States senator seems certain,” says Tallman. He is the father of some of our best land laws and would be a great man for the West to have in the legislative halls of the nation. Why people came forty miles in buggies and autos to listen to the message I carried to them. That one fact alone indicated the interest of the New Mexicans. The 600-acre homestead law is popular down there but the 250-acre law has settled east tracts of land.”
Commissioner Tallman refers to recent charges against President Wilson by Republican newspapers with a smile, “They are nothing but eleventh-hour boomerangs,” he says: “they are born of the desperation of despair. These papers and the Republican leaders are really in a pathetic plight just now. My trip has proved that they have lost the West beyond recall. The drift is to Wilson more and more each day.”
The great West sites up and takes notice when Clay Tallman speaks. Quietly yet effectively has he worked for its interests, and his administration of the land office is without a parallel in the things accomplished which have been of lasting benefit to the settler and the homesteader: yea, even the trail blazer.
