The ruling which took
that question away from the jury, on the ground that it was a question
of law and not of fact, and which declared that as a question of law,
the knowledge existed, was, I respectfully submit, a most 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, is the very gist of the offence 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 cannot be rec