In October 1913, weeks before the November general election, the city released updated electoral rolls showing 16,000 new registrants—an implausible number equal to more than three-quarters of the city’s entire eligible voting population. Stimson and a small group of women spent a week in the city clerk’s office, manually copying the names and addresses. Others took the lists and canvassed the precincts to hunt down the locations that applicants had listed as residences. Many were stores, schools, vacant lots or homes where the sole inhabitants were female. More than 2,700 of the registrations were fraudulent.
Because only a registered voter could challenge the eligibility of the voting rolls, Stimson had no recourse to disqualify the fraudulent registrations. Still, she and her group hoped they could apply pressure by observing the voting and catching men in the act of using those fraudulent names. Learning from the primary, Stimson outlined a more proactive approach for Vigo County’s Election Day. She supplied more than 450 volunteers with pencils and notebooks, and produced a one-page election-law summary and a tally sheet for each precinct. She also sent instructions for women to come to the polls with cameras—which had only recently become widely available to consumers—so they could document transgressions. When Roberts won the election, Stimson sent a telegram to the governor, informing him of the cheating. The governor responded that she should take up her concerns with the sheriff. Stimson knew that local law enforcement couldn’t be trusted to enforce election laws, because their careers depended on the favor of the politicians they were supposed to police.
Roberts made this clear when he named a public-safety cabinet of individuals who had been his loyal political associates. He also told the police superintendent to fire two police officers, Michael Hagerty and Patrick Haley, who happened to patrol the streets where allies of Roberts operated their saloons. But Hagerty and Haley refused to turn in their badges. They took their complaint to court, alleging that they were being illegally driven from the force. Upon hearing the claims, the judge, Charles Fortune, appointed a special prosecutor to investigate. His name was Joseph Roach Jr., and less than three years earlier, the judge had helped free him from a life sentence for murder.