An Old-Fashioned Oklahoma Election

Three of the four registered voters in my household voted more than two weeks ago, just 4 days into the early voting period here in North Carolina. That’s me, my hubby and our grandson who turned 18 in May. Daughter is voting today, mostly because she has this ‘thing’ about voting on election day. Then she and grandson are headed for Asheville to tend lines (I doubt there will be one here, more than three quarters of this end of the county early voted), then to an election party expected to go late into the night. Hubby and I will be off to our county seat, where we’ve been recruited as “Poll Ninjas” by the Dem chair, there to assist in case anybody is challenged, lawyers standing by.

Paper ballots again this year too, since Diebold got kicked out of the state after throwing the 2004 election into utter turmoil (it took months to sort out some state races, so many split-ticket votes had been compromised! Filling in the dot isn’t that hard. Counting them isn’t that hard either.

But it’ll be morning before we know the actual results, so I thought I’d offer a true story about voting out in “real America”…

Election Day in Wilburton, Oklahoma

It was 1982, a midterm election generally, but important locally for the city government, police chief and sheriff, county wigs. I worked as a typesetter and editor for the local weekly newspaper - it was the county seat, but there wasn’t enough going on in the county for more than a weekly. The newspaper office was across the street (little more than an alley) from the courthouse, police station and jail. Next door to the funeral home, across a vacant lot that was part of their big lawn.

There were no radio or television stations in the county, so the citizens started gathering on the funeral home lawn about a half hour before the polls closed. They brought blankets, lawn chairs, coolers, picnic baskets and children, by 7 p.m. the place was packed. Fred the publisher had a gigantic blackboard on a stand that was marked with grids in white paint that he’d used to post vote tallies as they came in for at least 4 decades. It was a regular feature for the county, families had been gathering there for generations.

Once the candidates and offices were written-in on the blackboard, we carried it outside and set it right in the middle of the street between our office and the courthouse where the votes were being counted. As the precinct totals were released, a runner would bring it to Fred in his big lawn chair, he’d nod, then I would hand it to the pressman precariously perched on a ladder, chalk in hand. He’d add the tally under the proper columns, and the people on the funeral home lawn would cheer or boo by turns. The totals had to be refreshed each time another precinct came in, and that was my job. I had a nice pocket calculator to help me with the math, and if I got it wrong I knew for sure I’d hear about it immediately from the crowd.

The last of the ballot boxes didn’t come in from far corners of the county until nearly 9 p.m., and by then many of the families with small children had made their way back home. But new people kept the lawn full as factory shifts were over and others got off work. The winners and losers were known by about 10 p.m. unless it was a very close race. We had one that year for Sheriff, it went all the way to 11 before we knew who won.

Now, we the “Paper People” didn’t get out of there until 3 a.m., since after all that song and dance for the audience we had to put the Special Election Edition together, get it printed and distributed. Made for a very, very long night, but I remember it fondly as my all-time favorite election.

Fred died some years ago, I have heard that the people don’t gather on the funeral home lawn anymore to watch the election results. They stay behind closed doors and watch Fox News, wait until the next day to find out who won the local contests. That’s very sad to me, just another symptom of the fog of depression that settled over Oklahoma when it abandoned its fervently Democratic status in favor of these past 8 years’ worth of fear-mongering, hate and insult. I don’t guess there will ever be a friendly community election again in that part of the country, so this little bit of Americana has gone the way of the dinosaur. I miss it, especially on an election day so full of Hope as this one!

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