REPORT.

To the Honorable

The House of Delegates of Maryland :

The Committee on Elections, to which was referred the
memorial of William Devecmon, Patrick Hamill, William
A. Bryden and John McElfish, contesting the right of Wm.
R. McCulley, Samuel M. Haller, Daniel C. Bruce and Chas.
Gilpin, to seats in this Honorable Body, as delegates from
Allegany county, and claiming said seats as being rightfully
entitled thereto, beg leave to report that they have, fully and
attentively, considered the questions raised by the contest-
ants in their memorial, and on which the sitting members
have joined issue in their counter memorial, and the evidence
produced on the respective sides, and herewith submit the con-
clusions at which they have arrived.

Before proceeding to investigate the charges, and the evi-
dence submitted to support them, your committee examined
the notices served on the sitting members, and found them in
legal form; and that in this particlar, as in other particulars
of form and substance, there has been a strict compliance on
their part with the reqirements and provisions of the Code
relating to contested elections in this House.

The charges were then proceeded with in the order in
which they are set forth in the memorial of the contestants ;
and in regard to these your committee, after a full review of
the testimony, were unable to perceive any evidence on which
the first charge in the contestants' memorial could be sus-
tained; while without doubt the conduct of the judges in
many of the districts, which will come more fully under re-
view hereafter, was in the judgment of your committee, par-
tial, unjust and illegal, and in some of them deeply reprehen-
sible in the matter of excluding legal voters, and in one of
the districts in soliciting voters to support a particular ticket;
yet there were no facts appearing to your committee to war-
rant them in finding that the judges of election themselves
were guilty of practicing threats and intimidations on legal
voters.

2nd. The second charge, "that the judges of election unlaw-
fully and fraudulently refused to permit registered voters to