Zeno Ponder could do anything he wanted to. There is a great story, and
you're doing a Republican thing here, but there's a great story about
the year George McGovern ran for president, and a bunch of college kids
from Mars Hill or someplace decided to take over a precinct, and it was
Zeno's precinct. They actually held a vote and voted Zeno out. They
turned the votes out. And it erupted into a major battle and
Page 34 fight, and finally from Raleigh they called a new
precinct meeting and sent people up to watch it. And Zeno's brother, E.
Y. Ponder, was sheriff. He was out rounding up people to come to the
precinct meeting, and caught one guy robbing a store or something or
wounded him in the arm and carried him to the precinct meeting
[Laughter] with the cuffs on and the blood
running down his arm
[Laughter] . So he had
to vote before he went to jail. Madison County has got wild stories all
over the place.
In my election in '72, Durham didn't report in. We were ahead. We were
6,000 votes ahead when we hit Durham, and Durham didn't report in and
didn't report in and didn't report in. I said, "Get a field man over
there and see what's happening." They called back from the county Board
of Elections and said, "Well, they haven't reported because five
precincts," which all happened to be black where we had no watchers, we
had no workers, "are still open." "What do you mean, they're open at
midnight?" The law says only if you're standing in line at 7:30 can you
go on and vote. Well, they said people were standing in line and it's
still open. And I contend to this day, they waited to see how many votes
they needed
[Laughter] , and then they
reported those precincts in because we had nobody to check them. That's
a real problem we have to this day, is having workers in every precinct
to at least check them. Let's see, I mentioned check-off boxes because
that's the thing in my craw right now. You've got the same thing that
every state has with redistricting. If you'll look, national
publications draw these wild looking
Page 35 districts to
show what gerrymander is. Look at the eighth district in North Carolina.
Goes from all the way over in Richmond County in the east, across the
bottom, comes up, has a neck on it, and goes up and picks up Davie.
Picks up those Republican counties over there and puts them with these
very Democratic counties over here, just to offset them. I think it's a
good example of the kind of weird drawn district that's a gerrymander.
We face that this time, and there's no question in my mind, we faced
it—it was a real problem. The Democrats in the legislature have bought
over a million dollars of software, the most up-to-date software you can
get, to draw lines right down to the precinct level. And secondly, Bob
Jordan, when he was testifying on veto power to the governor, said, "You
don't want to give this governor veto because they he could affect our
plans for redistricting." The bill that came out of the senate went one
step further. It gives the governor veto power but specifically
eliminates redistricting from his veto ability. So I think the message
is clear what they're going to do us there. Multi-member districts, we
have joined with the NAACP to try to break up multi-member districts in
many cases. What happens is if you have a big district that elects four
people and it has a large black population but not enough for the black
population to elect one of those four, you end up with all white
representatives. So the NAACP took suit that it was discriminating
against blacks. Well, we joined them because we said it was
discriminating against Republicans too. And what actually happens is
when they draw a district to ensure a black
Page 36
representative, we get a Republican. Because you take all that black
vote out of the thing. We almost got that in Durham last time. The court
had ruled they had to draw lines, and they had redrawn the lines in
Durham, and a northern Durham district was Republican. George Miller was
in it, who's a power in the legislature, but because the election he got
a law passed that took that back. So they're still elected county wide.
It happened in Wilson County, Jim Hunt's home. So there's now Larry
Edridge, Republican, and a black elected from this end of the county. So
when we get single member districts, it helps us too. But that's a law
that you had to go to court to get.