But many Philadelphians do not try to vote. They leave everything to the machine, and the machine casts their ballots for them. It is estimated that 150,000 voters did not go to the polls at the last election. Yet the machine rolled up a majority of 130,000 for Weaver, with a fraudulent vote estimated all the way from forty to eighty thousand, and this in a campaign so machine-made that it was called “no contest.” Francis Fisher Kane, the Democrat, got 32,000 votes out of some 204,000. “What is the use of voting?” these stay-at-homes ask. A friend of mine told me he was on the lists in the three wards in which he had successively dwelt. He votes personally in none, but the leader of his present ward tells him how he has been voted. Mr. J. C. Reynolds, the proprietor of the St. James Hotel, went to the polls at eleven o’clock last election day, only to be told that he had been voted. He asked how many others from his house had voted. An election officer took up a list, checked off twelve names, two down twice, and handed it to him. When Mr. Reynolds got home he learned that one of these had voted, the others had been voted. Another man said he rarely attempted to vote, but when he did, the officers let him, even though his name had already been voted on; and then the negro repeaters would ask if his “brother was coming ‘round to-day.” They were going to vote him, as they vote all good-natured citizens who stay away. “When this kind of man turns out,” said a leader to me, “we simply have two repeaters extra—one to balance him and one more to the good.” If necessary, after all this, the machine counts the vote “right,” and there is little use appealing to the courts, since they have held, except in one case, that the ballot box is secret and cannot be opened. The only legal remedy lies in the purging of the assessor’s lists, and when the Municipal League had this done in 1899, they reported that there was “wholesale voting on the very names stricken off.”