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

Preface

• ix • PREFACE This book was on my mind for more than twenty-five years, a stretch when I served on three courts—the Chancery Court of Pulaski County, the Arkansas Court of Appeals, and the Arkansas Supreme Court—and after I had given up a usually bootless career as the scourge of election thieves. I imagined that the fine and careful science of judging discouraged the kind of reflection, writing, and passing of historical judgment that would be entailed in recounting a political era in which I had been involved, not altogether impartially, and which continued while I was on the bench. Besides, if I was going to be the calm and dispassionate judge that people expected me to be, I ought to subdue rather than rekindle the brooding rage that I had felt over the freebooting political bosses and election officials with whom I had jousted and the government ’s benign disposition toward them. When I finally sat down after retirement to render the project to paper, the book evolved into something quite different from my original concept, which was to recount the heroic efforts of a band of women in one hill county to rend the veil of corruption and secrecy that had held their community in thrall since they were children and probably long before. Having co-opted my old friend Ernie Dumas into helping, I found myself yielding to his notions about what the narrative should be. He believed its commercial value would be raised if it were something of a memoir, a genre he thought was in fashion, and that its literary value would be improved by enlarging its historical perspective. Thus the book spends considerably more time reflecting on my personal strivings than I still find comfortable. It also takes a slightly longer look at the role of vote thieves in our state’s political history and development than I first intended, and it tries to chronicle a political movement of about a dozen years that coincide roughly with the onset of the modern progressive era in Arkansas. That is the period in which I was involved in election reform, often to the exclusion of everything else. The clean-election movement was led not by a party or by political leaders but by individual citizens who undertook to do what their public 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page ix institutions persistently failed to do, which was to ensure that elections for public office were honest and that the will of the people was scrupulously obliged. If there is a moral to this story, it is that vigilant and courageous individuals can bring about institutional change when civic and political leaders are unwilling. In writing this book, we have made every effort to set out documented accounts of Arkansas elections in which corruption was employed to win a race for political office or to influence the outcome of every race on the ballot. Readers will be astonished that such illegal acts occurred and went unpunished and that instead the perpetrators garnered power and money by using them. The practices can be traced far back into the state’s history, to the Reconstruction era and before. The violations were so flagrant that they ought to have shocked the public conscience and impelled law-enforcement agencies and the courts to correct the fraud and hold the perpetrators accountable. Instead, corruption in many places became embedded in the political culture. It would be foolish to pretend that other states have not experienced illegal voting, sometimes egregious and history making. Arkansas, however , is the one state where fraud was so dire and so perniciously ignored that citizens were forced to conduct their own investigations and file lawsuits to obtain an honest counting and tabulation of the votes. They did so sometimes under intimidation and threats to body and livelihood, and, on occasion, public officials turned the legal system against those who tried to unearth the fraud. As an attorney for the citizens who surrendered their privacy and entered the lists to fight election thievery in Arkansas in the 1960s and ’70s, the author unabashedly wishes that from this short history readers will take new devotion to the cause of honest and efficient elections, which are the foundation of our freedom. Ballot theft is not a mere issue of which among equally selfish factions will occupy the courthouse or city hall and exercise patronage and road-contracting privileges for the next two years. It can shape...