Operation Secret Ballot: The 1966 GOP Election Reform Project
by Paul Hollrah (h/t to Mike McCarville at the McCarville Report)
On Tuesday evening, September 10, 1963, I attended my first meeting of the Tulsa County Young Republicans. It was the first political meeting I’d ever attended, and as a result of attending that one meeting, and the things I learned there, my life was changed forever.
The guest speaker that evening was a man named Walter Hall, the Ballot Security Officer for the Oklahoma Republican State Committee. In his speech Hall described in shocking detail the widespread election fraud practiced by Oklahoma Democrats in every election. He began by saying that forty-four of Oklahoma’s seventy-seven counties had not provided a secret ballot for voters since statehood in 1907, and that local Democrats regularly used every conceivable illegal device to intimidate voters and to fraudulently control the outcome of elections.
Although state law required that one of the three election officials in every precinct must be a member of the minority party, Oklahoma Democrats systematically appointed bogus Republicans to the minority positions. Consequently, in many precincts in those forty-four counties, all of the election officials were, in fact, Democrats.
When voters entered the polls on Election Day they found three Democrats seated behind a table. After signing the entry log they were handed a paper ballot and a pencil, and since there were no facilities for marking ballots in secret, they were obliged to place their ballot on the table and to mark their ballot while the three election officials looked on. If the election officials saw a voter mark his ballot for even a single Republican candidate, a number of things could happen. In many Oklahoma counties the welfare rolls were divided up by precincts and kept on the tables in the polling places on Election Day. If a welfare recipient was so unwise as to vote for a Republican, his/her name was removed from the welfare rolls the instant the pencil marked the ballot. If the errant voter was a state or county employee, he ran the risk of being unemployed the same day. And if he was a property owner, he often found his property tax assessment doubled or tripled overnight.
In some counties the election officials were so brazen as to keep a trash can next to the ballot box, and any ballot with a Republican vote on it went directly into the trash can. The only ballots in the ballot box were straight Democratic tickets.In some counties they were a bit more subtle and used a technique that Walter Hall referred to as the “lead-under-the-thumbnail” trick. That technique involved breaking the lead from a pencil and tucking it lengthwise under a thumbnail.When the election official took a completed ballot from a voter, and the ballot contained a vote for a Republican candidate, the official merely scraped the lead across the face of the ballot, folded the ballot in the normal fashion, and placed it in the ballot box.
When the ballot boxes were opened and the ballots were removed, state law required that all ballots with “extraneous” markings be classified as “mutilated” ballots and not counted in the final tally.In other counties, election officials would allow a thumbnail to grow very long over a period of months preceding an election. On the day of the election they would file a sharp edge on the thumbnail so that, when they took a ballot containing a Republican vote from a voter and prepared to fold it, they merely flicked the sharp nail through the edge of the paper. Ballots with small rips and tears were considered to be “mutilated” and were discarded along with those having extraneous markings.
I was absolutely appalled at the speaker’s endless recounting of official corruption in the state’s electoral process. It was hard for me to believe that such corrupt practices could be standard practice in the greatest democracy on Earth, in the twentieth century, but there was no reason to doubt the truth of what he said.Having been an interested observer of the Democratic Party for many years, and having learned much more about it through many friendly debates with my in-laws, I was all but convinced that the party was just another large-scale criminal conspiracy, masquerading as a political party. After hearing Walter Hall’s presentation that evening I was absolutely certain of it.
Read the rest of this fascinating story below the jump...
