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

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My original premise in starting this book was to celebrate the courage and tenacity of a small clutch of women in Conway County, connected by family or friendship, who drew me into their struggle against the political machine that had held their community in thrall for years, partly through control of the ballot box. If I have an unpayable debt to anyone for any success that the book may achieve, it is to them. I am particularly grateful to the two who survived to see it, Dixie Drilling and Alidene Malone, and also Joan Paladino, whom we called “Tex,” who died as this book was in production, because their records and memories have been invaluable in putting together the narrative of those battles. I only wish that the others —Katie Read, Faye Dixon, Helen Gordon, Jan Lynch, and Margie Brown—had lived to see the day or that it had not taken me decades to commit the story to paper. Wherever else we had some success in combating election fraud it was owing to people like them who chose at some personal risk to stand up to the bosses. Most of them are dead, too, but I ought to acknowledge their contributions, even anonymously. Among the living, Dorothy Stuck, a high school history teacher who quit to help her husband run crusading weekly newspapers in northeast Arkansas and then devoted her life to equal justice, deserves special mention . Dorothy marked the sparrow’s fall in Poinsett County politics, and her keen memory of the details of the voting fraud forty-five years later complemented my records on the investigation. Similarly, Fern Elliott of Marshall helped me reconstruct the crusade that she and her late husband , Rex, began to end the ancient system of vote buying in Searcy County (if, in fact, it ended). Two prosecutors, Alex Streett and Tom Donovan, played a huge role, much bigger than my own, in pressing for a judicial remedy to the endemic election banditry in Conway and Faulkner Counties and were equally important in recounting the tale. Where my memory was fuzzy and the contemporary accounts indefinite, Alex’s were sharp. He apparently never tossed away a file. The county powers tried to put Tom in • xi • 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page xi prison for his work on election fraud, which seems to quicken his memory even now. The only other prosecuting attorney who evinced any interest in penalizing people who connived to flout election laws was Jim Guy Tucker, who served only two years before going on to higher things: attorney general, congressman, lieutenant governor and governor . I am grateful for his help in pinning down the details of investigations in North Little Rock and Little Rock in which I had a part. In a monumental miscarriage of justice, Tucker’s career would be ended in 1996 by a highly politicized prosecution. Richard Mays, who forsook his own struggling law practice to help me in the courtroom in several of the conflicts, helped again in reconstructing the events and legal strategies and focusing my mind on what was important. I am indebted to the lawyers, most of them law students at the time, who answered my call and served as poll watchers at the pivotal elections in Conway and Searcy Counties. The narrative is enriched by the colorful accounts of Mark Stodola, now the mayor of Little Rock; Jamie Cox, now a circuit judge at Greenwood; Joe Purvis, now a lawyer in Little Rock; and Robert Dittrich, the longtime prosecuting attorney at Stuttgart. Their remembrances have not dimmed, and I am grateful for their sharing them. I would be remiss if I did not also pay tribute to the other young lawyers who worked with me in our first venture into the labyrinth of Arkansas elections as John Haley’s Election Research Council or its reincarnation as The Election Laws Institute, but I am afraid that my recollections are too feeble to name them all. I must mention two of them, my longtime good friend and adviser, Jim Wallace, and Ralph Hamner Jr., who often went where I could not go and who has continued to advise. Judge David Bogard of North Little Rock, my lifelong friend, supplied his keen insights into the history of election fraud and jurisprudence. I wish that George Fisher, the keenest social critic of our time, were still around so that I could thank him for the indispensable contribution that he made...