Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In some of the United States, a board consisting of certain designated State officers, who are by law empowered to canvass and declare returns of elections held within the State.
Etymologies
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Examples
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The returning-board of Louisiana, which had before been so useful, was in full working order; Florida was similarly equiped; South
The Negro and the Nation A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement George Spring Merriam 1878
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He controlled the State returning-board, to which the laws intrusted a very elastic and dangerous power of throwing out returns from districts where intimidation was proved, and undertook to declare McEnery elected.
The Negro and the Nation A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement George Spring Merriam 1878
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At the 1874 election the Conservatives were successful at the polls; but the State returning-board at once began to juggle with the returns so palpably that the Conservative member protested and resigned.
The Negro and the Nation A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement George Spring Merriam 1878
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Ratcliffe's offer must have been seen by half Washington, and her reply was awaited by an immense audience, as though she were a political returning-board.
Democracy, an American novel Henry Adams 1878
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A returning-board which had not, and did not pretend to have the election returns before it, yet which was the only one recognized by Judge Durell, who was firm in his policy of usurpation, seated the Kellogg government, and struck a direct blow at the will of the majority.
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This seems hardly credible, when it is remembered that the masses of the conservative citizens vehemently assert that the returning-board which established that legislature in power had no official statements in its possession on which to base its conclusion, and since they are supported in their assertion by the declaration of a Committee of the United States Senate that the Lynch returning-board's canvass "had no semblance of integrity."
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He is fond of gloomy horoscopes, and delights in announcing to the world that the precedent established in Louisiana by the Lynch returning-board and the Durell decision will yet be disastrous to New York and Massachusetts.
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That the returning-board of Louisiana will find no imitators in our future history is more than I dare hope.
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It was never dreamed that a tribunal, consisting in part of five judges of the highest court on earth, was to be constituted, whose sole duty was to report a fact known to every man in the land, that the returning-board of Louisiana had given the votes of that State to the Hayes electors.
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-- can be inquired into in all the relations of human life save only where a returning-board is its instrument, and the dearest rights of
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