I Love Elections

Vote early and often - Mayor Richard Daley (Sr.) of Chicago

The Philippines has the highest murder rate in the world. This murder rate doubles in election years - factoid

We used to live in a small (very small), rural Texas town, less than 15,000 strong. There was actually a local newspaper, but they published only twice a week, Tuesday and Saturday. Small town newspapers at that point in time (15-16 years ago) basically amounted to gossipy blogs and advertising supplements. Not to mention the all-important Farm Report and Hog Futures. However, every 2 years that paper was transformed into a pipeline that fascinated me to the point that I would stand at the window, watching for the paperboy to toss it at our house. Sometimes he even got close.

You see, every time that elections rolled around, congressional, senatorial, presidential, school board, city council, etc., that eternal behemoth, Small Town Politics, reared its majestic, bewildering, salacious head and I was once again hooked. Our little newspaper swelled to THREE sections, not just two, and I jumped happily into the maelstrom / soap opera / mud patch to see who was wallowing and why.

Oh, the stories I could tell. One city councilman, intoxicated by his own power, wanted to get his son hired as a city policeman, presumably to become Chief of Police within a decent length of time, two or three months. The fact that junior had quite a reputation in town for hijinks and guilty pleasures did not seem to be an obstacle to daddy's aspirations. So daddy began following our current chief around town, vehicularly and on foot, trying to document and accumulate dirt and perhaps even identify High Crimes and Misdemeanors. The chief, spooked by this behavior and not realizing who his shadow was, began assigning a deputy here or there to follow the follower. No, I am not making this up. Once the facts came out, all parties then began throwing verbal punches and all this kept our little journalists quite busy for a while.

I love this one: our District Attorney one year was not only fighting his political opponent but also the high school. Seems his darling ittle daughter had called a substitute teacher a B**** and had been assigned Saturday School. Daddy's girl was furious with this injustice and both mommy and daddy called for a special session of the school board in order to protest. You see, according to them, this poor child called the teacher a B**** because she WAS a B****. And her parents could not understand what the fuss was all about. Their reasoning was that the teacher and daddy's political opponent had manufactured this whole thing in order to embarass him. Honestly, he didn't need any help. He was perfectly capable of embarassing himself.

Some of the shenanigans were not funny. Several campaign workers for one candidate were arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned for following US Postal Service trucks around, noting which senior citizens received absentee ballots, removing the ballots and carrying them to the recipients by hand. Those who did not want to fill out the ballots as instructed by the miscreants were threatened with loss of benefits and other nasty problems. I hope the criminals rot in jail.

My favorite is this: Imagine, if you will, a County Tax Assessor (female) locking herself and the county voter registration books in a broom closet at the county court house with the Texas Rangers pounding on the door, shouting, "Ma'am, you're gonna have to come out of there sooner or later!" Time and nature and the Texas Rangers won, the voter records were sent to the state for audit and we learned why. Turns out that almost a third of the most faithful and active voters in the county had been residing in the cemetery for years, decades even. Who says there's no life after death?

Tags: politics, Texas Rangers, small towns, voter fraud, elections, local politics, district attorney, school board