Waiting for the Cemetery Vote: The Fight to Stop Election Fraud in Arkansas

Epilogue

EPILOGUE Having set out to record historical episodes of election fraud, quite a number of which engaged my poor skills as an investigator and lawyer, I worry that it is now expected of me that I say what it all meant. If it is not altogether historical and is still a problem, what can we do about it now? I would like to be able to say that technology, better laws, heightened scrutiny, a public that is less tolerant of the schemes of the vote thieves and, in our state, the arrival of a vigilant two-party system have made serious and widespread fraud impossible. I do think that Winthrop Rockefeller was right in 1964 when he said that fifty thousand votes could be manipulated in a statewide election, and I believe that fraud on such a scale now is quite unlikely. But not impossible. The possibilities are not scarce, only riskier. It does not take fifty thousand votes but only a fistful of fraudulent ballots to swing an election for county coroner, governor or president of the United States. When passions move elections, as they increasingly do, winning at all cost is the guiding impulse. The urge to go the extra mile to put your man in office or keep him there is eternal. I do not know but suspect that every judge or clerk who ever stuffed a ballot box, altered a return or filled out a fake absentee application and ballot felt a patriotic impulse. You believe it is important to put the best man, your man, in office, and that whatever risks you take to achieve it are for the public good. If there is will, there usually is a way. Four years ago, they were able to rig an election for a state senator in east Arkansas under the watchful gaze of a smart and determined opponent and a unanimously disapproving supreme court. They got away with it. Laws now are in place to prevent it. What is still missing is the will to enforce the laws, which was always the central problem. If people who break the law, even to elect the princeliest of men, were to be punished swiftly and resolutely there would soon be few with the will to do it. Love, hate, and money will drive men to take terrible risks, but not so the election of a municipal judge or state senator. Fudging on the • 215 • 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 215 casting and counting of ballots has never entailed much risk in Arkansas. The machinery of modern elections, which registers and counts the votes of people swiftly and mechanically or digitally, is an advancement, but it carries risks, too. The unlettered rubes who managed the ballot boxes in George Fisher’s cartoons may be daunted by machines on which people vote or that electronically read a voter’s ballot, but voting technology is not foolproof and I am not convinced that it will ever be. No one tried to cheat people out of their votes in Florida when machines and then individual voting officials were confused by the “hanging chads” that voters failed to punch out altogether in the punch-card machines. That innocent quandary may have changed the outcome of a presidential election and sharply altered the course of history. The unsophisticated election clerks in Morrilton’s First Ward may not be a threat to manipulate the equipment to thwart the will of the voters there, but there is not enough genius in the world of high technology to prevent a clever hacker somewhere, maybe a junior high school student with a cheap laptop, from breaking the code, and spreading havoc across the country and the world. If a lone agent can put the banking system or national security at risk, why not an election that rests on the reliability of computerized voting systems? There is the possibility of voting fraud, undetectable fraud, on a scale that we have never known. It need not be on a big scale to do cataclysmic injustice. Fraud in a handful of boxes in Ohio, Florida, or Nevada in national elections dilutes the votes of people in Blue Ball, Arkansas, and robs the country of the just expression of its will. I worry about it a lot. 216 • Epilogue 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 216 ...