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Politics here in these mountains has calmed down considerably in the past few decades.
Democrats are now an endangered species and the old practice of buying votes on Election Day, enthusiastically done by both parties, has vanished.
Gone with the wind, just like the time-honored strategy of each party voting names gathered from tombstones.
East of Asheville, in the general vicinity of Hickory, as a youth I heard tales of two good Democrats who were the engineer and fireman on a freight train that ran on Election Day from Asheville down to Charlotte.
By the time they got to Charlotte late that night the two were nearly drunk and had each been given a shot of whiskey and voted about a dozen times, using names of dead Democrats still registered in the towns along the tracks.
The old saying supposedly came from Chicago politics, urging the party faithful on Election Day “ to vote early … and often.”
Grassroots vote-buying
Here in Cherokee and Clay counties both parties had their hauling and buying organizations, their own “bag man” and a method of proving that the bought voter had cast his ballot correctly.
Election laws allowed a voter to request assistance and each party had “helpers” ready to do just that. Inside the curtained booth the deed was done, the ballot either marked on the spot or one already marked substituted. Voter then went back outside to the “bag man” to get paid.
Several things changed that picture.
Federal authorities in Asheville in the 1980s indicted several people for vote-buying. Three sheriffs from our two counties went to prison for it.
We also got voting machines, currently electronic models, instead of the old loose paper ballots. Changing the voters’ paper ballots and “stuffing the box” to favor a particular candidate was no longer possible.
Good Government League
In the late 1940s trying to stuff a ballot box got a man killed outright at nearby Copperhill, Tenn.
The Depression-recovery efforts of President Franklin Roosevelt – public works, the TVA and electricity for poor folks – had all combined to convert many naturally Republican mountaineers into becoming Democrats. And the Democrat Party became quite strong.
In next-door Polk County it also became quite corrupt, led by a sheriff who had been in office for 18 years when World War II ended. Returning veterans, who had defeated the Germans and Japanese, would not stand for the crooked Democrat sheriff and his machine.
So they formed the Good Government League to throw the rascals out. One of the vets, long since dead, told me about it.
“It was rough,” he said. “We left Copperhill and Ducktown in a long caravan of cars heading to Benton for our last rally just before the election. The other side had covered the Ocoee River road with roofing nails and blew out all our tires.”
They limped back home, he said, but were ready for anything on Election Day.
At Copperhill, he said, the voting was going on in an old house and one of the sheriff’s supporters about dark was determined to get the box and change the results. Armed veterans were standing in the yard on watch.
“At first he tried to pull the switch-box on the back porch to put the house in darkness,” the vet told me. “That didn’t work so he climbed the power pole behind the house, to pull the jack and cut off all power to the voting house.”
A veteran raised his rifle, my source said, and shot the man off the pole “like killing a squirrel.”
The gun-toting vets escorted the Copperhill ballot box to Benton and the machine was defeated.
Similar incidents occurred at Athens,Tenn., and other counties and eventually the National Guard had to be called out. A bombing incident at Copperhill in the early 1960s was supposedly linked back to the “revolution” of the late '40s and early '50s.
Democrat numbers down
In 1970, a new registration of voters was ordered . Figures we printed in this newspaper showed Democrats outnumbering the Republicans by good margins, only a handful of independents (now called unaffiliated).
By the 1974 elections it was 5,400 Democrats, 4,300 Republicans, less than 600 independents. By 1992 it was 7,690 Democrats, 5697 Republicans, about 1,000 independents.
Today it is 13,209 Republicans, 8,401 independents and only 2,969 Democrats. Current figures provided by elections office.
Jimmy Carter in his 2015 book A Full Life tells of hearing a bill debated in the Georgia State Senate in the mid-1960s (but never passed) that would have allowed a dead man to be voted in state elections BUT ABSOLUTELY NO LONGER THAN 3 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH.
Wally Avett is a columnist for the Cherokee Scout. His books are available as signed copies at the Scout office in Murphy. Call him at 828-837-5531 or email wallyavett@gmail.com.