| Waiting
for the Cemetery Vote
The Fight to Stop Election Fraud in Arkansas
Tom Glaze
With Ernie Dumas
When
a hound dog can vote in seventy-five counties, the laws are
in sad shape
"Judge Tom
Glaze's memoir of ballot-box rascality a generation back is
a stupendous narrative of how officials, mostly Democratic,
connived, padded, and stole the votes they needed, and how
at least a few of them were brought to book."
—Mark Wahlgren Summers in the Arkansas Historical
Quarterly
“Tom
Glaze has written a spirited and captivating memoir of his
courageous days in the sixties and seventies combating election
fraud in Arkansas. His passionate and focused campaign to
rid the state of election chicanery, particularly as practiced
by Sheriff Marlin Hawkins in Conway County, and his success
in doing so with the help of several brave women, proves that
one person can make a difference.”
—Justice Robert L. Brown
Waiting
for the Cemetery Vote begins with an overview chapter
of Arkansas election fraud since the nineteenth century and
then moves on to more specific examples of fraudulent activities
over a dozen or so years that coincide with the onset of the
modern progressive era in Arkansas.
Author Tom Glaze, who was a trial lawyer battling election
fraud
during this time, is the ideal chronicler for this topic,
bringing a memoirist’s intimate insight together with
a wealth of historical knowledge.
Glaze describes the manipulation of absentee ballots and poll-tax
receipts; votes cast by the dead, children, and animals; forgeries
of ballots from nursing homes; and threats to body or livelihood
made to anyone who would dare question these activities or
monitor elections. Deceptive practices used to control election
results were disturbingly brazen in the gubernatorial elections
in the 1960s and were especially egregious in Conway and Searcy
Counties in the 1970s and in special elections for the state
senate in Faulkner, Conway, and Van Buren Counties.
A clean-election movement began in the early 1970s, led not
by party or political leaders but by individual citizens.
These vigilant and courageous Arkansans undertook to do what
their public institutions persistently failed to: insure that
elections for public office were honest and that the will
of the people was scrupulously obliged. Prominent and colorful
among these groups was a small band of women in Conway County
who dubbed themselves the “Snoop Sisters” and
took on the long-established corrupt machine of Sheriff Marlin
Hawkins.
Written with longtime Arkansas political writer Ernie Dumas
and illustrated with cartoons from the inimitable George Fisher,
Waiting for the Cemetery Vote will be an entertaining
and informative read for any
Arkansas history and politics buffs.
Tom
Glaze was a member of the Arkansas bar for
forty-four years, the first twelve as a trial lawyer battling
vote fraud and the last twenty-two as an associate justice
of the Arkansas Supreme Court.
Ernie
Dumas is a columnist for the Arkansas
Times and former associate editor and reporter for the
Arkansas Gazette.
George
Fisher was a political cartoonist who worked
for various Arkansas newspapers, most notably the Arkansas
Gazette and Arkansas Times, from the 1940s until
his death in 2003.
May
6 x 9, 236 pages, 41 illustrations, index
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-965-0
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