University of Arkansas Press Publishes Waiting for the Cemetery Vote

Photo Submitted

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published Waiting for the Cemetery Vote: The Fight to Stop Election Fraud in Arkansas (19.95, paper) by Tom Glaze, with Ernie Dumas.

This latest book from the University of Arkansas Press begins with an overview chapter of Arkansas election fraud since the 19th century and covers the topic through the modern progressive era in Arkansas. Tom Glaze, who was a trial lawyer battling election fraud during this time, and later became an associate justice for the Arkansas Supreme Court, wrote the book with Ernie Dumas, a long-time Arkansas political writer.

Glaze and Dumas describe 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 those who would dare question these activities or monitor elections.

The co-authors are long-time friends who talked about the book for years, but had only had time to work on it recently, according to Dumas. “Tom for many years wanted to write a book about the bravery of the Conway County women, known as the ‘snoop sisters,’ who set out to clean up elections and local government, even though it made them pariahs among their neighbors and families,” Dumas said.

According to Glaze and Dumas, Arkansas’ history of political corruption is not atypical. “Although the South and a few big cities of the Midwest and the East have deep traditions of corrupt elections, the culture in the South is different, we think, in that it traces to Reconstruction and its aftermath and the all-out struggle for supremacy in the New South, where anything and everything was considered permissible to grasp and retain political power,” Dumas said.

While Waiting for the Cemetery Vote provides historical overview and context, it is also Glaze’s personal story. Over the dozen or so years that Glaze tracked voter fraud, he said that the most shocking thing he discovered was that it was possible that “the whole power of government — the police, the courts, the whole executive establishment — could be arrayed against a person or a group of citizens who spoke up or tried to correct fraud and corruption. Citizens shouldn’t fear punishment or intimidation by their government for simply asking that the laws be observed, but it has happened from time to time,” Glaze said.

While ethics were lacking, creativity was not. “Everyone has heard stories, apocryphal or real, about vote buying, but I was still amazed to discover a county where it was the modus operandi and had been for generations,” Glaze said. “In Searcy County, probably back in the Depression, they had perfected a system where candidates of either party or faction pooled their money and their agents bartered for the votes of people, using tokens such as new pennies, kernels of corn, dried peas or buttons, which were exchanged inside the polling places and then redeemed outside for cash. Both parties and county election officials agreed to stop the practice in 1976 and never do it again when we went to federal court and subpoenaed testimony about it.”

Waiting for the Cemetery Vote is illustrated with contemporary cartoons by the late George Fisher, including the cover image, a portrayal of Tom Glaze smoking the rats out of a ballot box. Robert L. Brown, associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court and author of Defining Moments, called the new book “spirited and captivating,” and Roy Reed, author of Faubus and Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, humorously said that “today’s office seekers may read the book as a cautionary tale, or as a how-to manual.”

Ernie Dumas will be in Fayetteville speaking to the Political Animals Club of Northwest Arkansas on Thursday, June 16, at 7 a.m. at the Fayetteville Clarion. For more information, contact Richard Hudson regarding reservations at 479-575-7964.