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

9. Independence Day

CHAPTER 9 Independence Day “As long as I have the energy, I hope I can continue to ‘steal elections.’” —MARLIN HAWKINS, HOW I STOLE ELECTIONS Nineteenhundredseventy-sixwasaverygood year. It wasthe bicentennial of American independence, and the country and our little state were caught up in a wave of nostalgia and patriotism. For a year before the culminatingFourthof Julycelebrationandformonthsafterward,thecountry, every state, and thousands of cities heralded the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with fireworks, wagon trains, speeches, and every novel event that local bicentennial committees could imagine and stage. The euphoria and the endless recitation of the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence seemed to bring the country out of the national funkthat followed those deeply divisive and embittering episodes, WatergateandtheVietnamWar.Ithelped engenderanera of good feeling in Arkansas, too. The state emerged from a prolonged recession and it would be another two years before the oil shocks and inflation would send the economy reeling and the nation and Arkansas back into gloom. Governor David Pryor named my old friend and boss Joe Purcell, by then the lieutenant governor, to chair the commission that planned the 200thanniversary celebrations in Arkansas. It occurred to me that Pryor chose Purcell because he was sure that Joe, celebrated for his somnolent stage presenceandwoodenoratory,wouldnot be upstaginghim oranyone else. But I’m sure that Pryor picked him because he knew that Joe would consider it the most important task in the world and would work at it with • 165 • 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 165 the same seriousness and doggedness that he approached the most inane task, which he did. The bicentennial was a faint motif all spring and summer as we went about the business of trying to ensure that people got honest and fair elections in counties with a history of election rigging. While we were trying in the spring to get the Democratic Central Committee in Conway County to appoint election officials who would give an honest accounting of the voters’ preferences in the May and June primaries, Joe’s bicentennial wagon train made its way down old US Highway 64 from Fort Smith and stopped at Morrilton for some local festivities. An express rider delivered a scroll that proclaimed that the state was renewing its commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Oh, if only that had been true! The bicentennial nostalgia evoked conflicting feelings—a cynicism that here in Arkansas we were demonstrably falling short of ensuring everyone an equal voice in the democracy, and on the other hand an abiding sense that we were indeed engaged in a patriotic effort to renew the founding principles by trying to protect people’s right to vote and to have everyone’s vote counted fairly and undiluted by fraud. It would perhaps not be coincidence that 1976 would be the year that two of the most notorious counties, Conway and Searcy, managed with great effort to have reasonably honest elections for the first time in many years. They were in both instances the products of aroused citizenry—the Snoop Sisters and a growing band of supporters in Conway County, and a handful of determined citizens in Searcy County fifty miles to the north. In the end, in both counties it required the intervention of the United States District Court. The women who had worked so hard to unmask the deceit and intimidation in Conway County’s elections were determined that all the labor they had put in before and after the 1975 runoff election, all the anger and heartache that it had engendered, and all the evidence of fraud that they had assembled would not be wasted. They wanted to make the 1976 party primaries a test of the progress that had been made both in the education of the voters and in making ballot thievery too dangerous for Sheriff Hawkins and his friends to risk. Although we would have preferred to press forward with a trial of the year-old charges of fraud against the six judges and clerks in Morrilton’s Ward One, we agreed 166 • Independence Day 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 166 Independence Day • 167 with Alex that the first admissions of illegal voting that the plea bargain produced might be a wake-up call to voters who had always believed Hawkins’s regular assertions that elections...