st palpable error, both in law and justice. It was an
error in law, because its effect was to deny any force whatever
to the most important word which the statute uses in defining the
offense--the word "knowingly." It was also unjust, because it
makes the law declare a known falsehood as a truth, and then by
force of that judicial falsehood condemns the defendant to such
punishment as she could only lawfully be subject to, if the
falsehood were a truth.

I admit that it is an established legal maxim that every person
(judicial officers excepted) is bound, and must be presumed, to
know the law. The soundness of this maxim, in all the cases to
which it can properly be applied, I have no desire to question;
but it has no applicability whatever to this case. It applies in
every case where a party does an act which the law pronounces
criminal, whether the party knows or does not know that the law
has made the act a crime. That maxim would have applied to this
case, if the defendant had voted, knowing that she had no legal
right to vote; without knowing that the law had made the act of
knowingly voting without a right, a crime. In that case she would
have done the act which the law made a crime, and could not have
shielded herself from the penalty by pleading ignorance of the
law. But in the present case the defendant has not done the act
which the law pronounces a crime. The law has not made the act of
voting without a lawful right to vote, a crime, where it is done
by mistake, and in the belief by the party voting that he has the
lawful right to vote. The crime consists in voting "knowingly,"
without lawful right. Unless the knowledge exists in fact, the
very gist of the offense is wanting. To hold that the law
presumes conclusively that such knowledge exists in all cases
where the legal right is wanting, and to reject all evidence to
the contrary, or to deny to such evidence any effect, as has been
done on this trial, is to strike the word "knowingly" out of the
statute--and to condemn the defendant on the legal fiction that
she was acting in bad faith, it being all the while conceded that
she was in fact acting in good faith. I admit that there are
precedents to sustain such ruling, but they can not be reconciled
with the fundamental principles