Returning Boards, boards formed to canvass votes cast in an election. They were created in some of the reconstructed States a few years after the close of the Civil War, for the purpose of rectifying fraud or violence that might be practiced on the negroes at the polls. In 1868 Arkansas established the first returning board. South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida had similar boards. The various returning boards were successively abolished by the respective State Legislatures.
Entry from Everybody's Cyclopedia,
1912.