Former Turkey Creek Precinct (still standing)
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
MAY 29, 2020 | Over and over, investigations find that there is little downright fraud in elections these days. Yet the die-hards try to convince us that we should greatly tighten our registration procedures because of the threat of voter fraud.
Rigging elections has often been tried, but seldom worked. A few scalawags have found ways to get around the system, as I did when I was four years old, when I cast my first vote.
It was the Democratic primary of 1939. My uncle, grandmother and I pulled into the grove of trees at the one-room Turkey Creek “courthouse” precinct in Wilkinson County. My uncle and I went into the building. My uncle got two ballots, one for himself and one for his mother. We took the ballots to the automobile, where my grandmother was waiting. (Yes, yes, this was an inappropriate procedure, but in those days, friends at the poll knew and trusted one another.)
My grandmother read over the ballot, then handed it to me, saying, “Here, boy, you vote.” So, on the hood of that car, I marked that 1939 ballot. I am sure my uncle saw that I voted “right.” I suspect that I voted for Gene Talmadge, since later my uncle got a job as a state seed inspector.
The poll officials might have objected to taking the ballot out of the precinct “courthouse.” But no one did.
There are many stories about the dead voting, aided by living politicians. One story out of Pedernales County, Texas, places future President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in one of his early campaigns in Texas, with his friends copying down names on tombstones so the dead could vote. Story goes that Lyndon was having trouble reading one tombstone, and his buddies said: “Come on Lyndon, we’ve got enough names.” Lyndon is said to reply: “Gimme time to figure this name out. This guy has as much of a right to vote as the others.”
The Talmadge crowd, down in McRae in 1946, did Texas one better. The Atlanta Journal found evidence that in Telfair County 103 persons, then resting comfortably in the cemetery, had voted…(get this) in alphabetical order! This trick might not have been discovered had not the tally sheets been for those voting being in obvious alphabetical order. (The AJC won its first Pulitzer Prize by uncovering this story.)
While paper ballots are mostly not used these days, should they be, there is a relatively simple way to stuff a ballot box. All you need is a straw boss who has a crew of workers willing to sell their vote for a small fee, maybe $5 or $10, (or perhaps a half pint of whiskey), to allow the straw boss to mark the ballots. Call me if you want to know the details. I got the story directly from a straw boss himself.
Back as late as about 1970, voters willing to sell their vote were being paid $5 each in Long County Georgia. In those days, a banker in Vidalia one Tuesday asked me which way I was going to drive back home. “I can go either way,” I said of the two routes to Jesup. “Why don’t you go back through Ludowici today?” he asked.
“Why?” I asked him back. He said: “I would like you to take some cash down to our bank there. It’s election day and they have run out of $5 bills.”
“But…but…won’t that be dangerous, me hauling cash? Why, I might be robbed.”
“Naw,” the banker said, “They’ll never expect a weekly newspaperman to have that much cash on him.”
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