A massive scandal is unfolding in Washington involving John I. Davenport, a federal official accused of grossly inflating his fees and charges while organizing New York City's voter registration records. The headline announces that Davenport is attempting to justify extraordinary payments to himself and the federal government for work supposedly required by an 1871 law reform act. The core of the story involves Davenport's creation of intricate 'block books'—alphabetically arranged registries of property owners and voters in each city block—which he claims required extensive indexing work. However, the First Comptroller's investigation reveals a tangled web of financial manipulation. Davenport collected fees from multiple sources: $1,200 from the Treasury, $24,500 from the Secret Service fund (via Col. Whitley on presidential order), and additional charges for supervising elections. He ultimately received $2,700.75 for work he claimed cost him $10,000, yet somehow profited. The most damaging admission comes in his own letters: much of the work he charged the government for wasn't actually covered by law and should never have been paid for at all.

This scandal crystallizes the chaos and corruption of the post-Reconstruction era. Grant's presidency (1869-1877) was plagued by scandals involving officials using government contracts for personal enrichment. The Davenport case exemplifies how federal authority over elections—still a raw issue just 11 years after the Civil War—created opportunities for graft. The creation of voter registration systems in major cities like New York was theoretically necessary for Reconstruction enforcement, but the vague legal language allowed men like Davenport to bill the government for work that was either unnecessary, duplicative, or entirely self-serving. This type of abuse helped fuel public disgust with Republican administration and contributed to Democratic gains in the 1876 elections happening around the very time this article was published.

• Davenport charged 10 cents per oath administered to supervisors and deputy marshals, and 10 cents per list of registrants filed—penny-ante fees that accumulated into thousands because they were applied to every single election-related interaction, revealing how systematic nickel-and-diming could become embezzlement at scale.
• He printed 3,000 block books in 1873 at tremendous expense, then created expensive lithograph maps showing each district divided into blocks—all allowable charges that accumulated to $18,350.85 in printing and stationery bills alone, suggesting he'd essentially created a private publishing operation on the government dime.
• Davenport's own admission that he spent $11,000 on indexing but was only 'short' $200 for two years of work, while simultaneously receiving $24,500 from the Secret Service fund, makes the mathematics almost laughably transparent—he was being paid from multiple sources to do what should have cost far less.
• The First Comptroller caught him inflating charges for a single Congressional election district from $5,000 to $40,000, a claim so obviously false that it forced Davenport to blame his clerk for a computational error—the difference being $3,400 in overcharges.
• His defense letter invokes inspections and approval by President Grant, Senator Conkling, Senator Ritchcock, and even the Attorney General's office as justification—suggesting that high-level Republican figures had signed off on dubious spending, implicating the entire administration in the scheme.

• Davenport's 'block books' system—while wasteful—was actually an innovation: creating alphabetized registries of voters by geographic blocks was genuinely new technology for election administration. The problem wasn't the idea but his ability to bill taxpayers endless amounts for maintaining and revising them annually, turning good government into a personal income stream.
• This scandal landed on front pages in April 1876, just seven months before the Hayes-Tilden election, one of the most contested and corrupt elections in American history—the Davenport case was part of a wave of Grant-era corruption scandals that poisoned public confidence in Republican integrity right when it mattered most.
• The mention of Col. Whitley of the Secret Service fund is significant: Whitley was Grant's favorite detective and later became infamous for his own corruption scandals, suggesting Davenport wasn't alone in treating the Secret Service budget as a piggy bank for discretionary spending.
• Davenport's claim that he invented this voter registration system 'to prevent fraud' is darkly ironic—he was committing fraud while ostensibly building anti-fraud infrastructure, mirroring how many Reconstruction-era federal programs were corrupted from within by the very officials meant to administer them.