Oklahoma Election 2024 Category

In-person absentee (early) voting will be available at in every county from Wednesday, October 30, through Friday, November 1, 2022 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and on Saturday, November 2, 2022, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. In most counties, this will be at the County Election Board office or county courthouse; here is the full list of absentee-in-person voting sites. Eight counties have two or more absentee-in-person sites (Cleveland County has 4):

• Canadian County: Canadian Valley Technology Center Cowan Campus, Yukon; El Reno Public Safety Center
• Cleveland County: MNTC South Penn Campus, OKC; Moore Public Library; Noble Public Library; Sooner Mall
• Oklahoma County: Election Board; MAC Center, Edmond
• Osage County: Election Board; First Baptist Church, Skiatook (West Rogers Campus)
• Rogers County: Election Board; Central Baptist Church in Owasso
• Tulsa County: Election Board, 555 N. Denver; Remote Voting Location, 12000 East Skelly Drive
• Wagoner County: First Baptist Church, Wagoner; NSU-BA, Broken Arrow

CHANGES in Tulsa County early voting

The Tulsa County Election Board has established a new early voting site in east Tulsa, at 12000 East Skelly Drive, on the south-east service road of I-44, east of 11th & Garnett. This is a larger building with more parking and easier access, better able to accommodate large numbers of early voters.

Tulsa County Election Board secretary Gwen Freeman urges early voters to make use of the new facility. The current HQ at 555 N. Denver will be open for early voting, but parking will be occupied by precinct workers preparing for election day as well as absentee-by-mail voters handing in their ballots in person (which can be done ONLY at the County Election Board). In years past, early voters have had to park in the surrounding neighborhood, walk a distance to the election board, and then queue around the parking lot, out in the weather.

After the new year, the Election Board will relocate to 12000 E. Skelly Drive. Old timers will know this as the Lowrance Electronics plant, home of the Fish LO-K-TOR. The building opened in 1970 and was doubled in size in 1972 (once they found matching brick). It now has over 100,000 sq. ft. of floor space, almost five times larger than the Marina-style Safeway, built in 1964, that has housed the election board since 1996.

Precinct polls will be open Tuesday, November 5, 2024, from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

In addition to the general election for federal, statewide, legislative, and county offices, runoffs for mayor of Tulsa and three Tulsa City Council seats. There are two state questions on the ballot, and twelve appellate judges (three Supreme Court, three Court of Criminal Appeals, six Court of Civil Appeals) are up for retention. Here is the complete list of ballot items, sorted by county.

NOTE: Precinct boundaries, voting locations, and district boundaries have changed, in some cases dramatically since the last presidential election in 2020. Enter your name and date of birth on the Oklahoma State Election Board's online voter portal and you will see your precinct location and your sample ballot.

In response to popular demand, I have assembled the guidance detailed below into a
downloadable, printable, single-page PDF.

Here are the candidates I'm recommending and (if in the district) voting for in the Oklahoma general election and City of Tulsa runoff election on November 5, 2024. Click the hyperlink on the office to see detailed information on that race and its candidates. (This entry will change as I decide to add more detail, link previous articles, or discuss additional races between now and election day. The entry is post-dated to keep it at the top.)

As I post this, I'm still unsure about several races, and there are other races I had planned to write about in detail, but time is short, people are voting, and many have asked for a summary of my recommendations.

City of Tulsa:

Mayor: Karen Keith (D)
Council District 2: Stephanie Reisdorph (R)
Council District 7: Eddie Huff (R)
Council District 9: Jayme Fowler (R)

City of Tulsa elections are officially non-partisan, and marking a straight-party vote doesn't cover these races. Party affiliations do not appear on the ballot; above are the voter registrations of the candidates. Conservatives have a Hobson's choice in the Mayor's race between two liberal Democrats; above is what I believe to be the least bad choice. We need southeast Tulsa voters to elect Eddie Huff, to defeat the left-wing incumbent, in order to have even the beginnings of a conservative voice at City Hall.

Statewide:

Corporation Commissioner: Chad Williams (L)
SQ 833 (Public Improvement Districts): NO
SQ 834 (Only citizens are qualified electors): YES

Federal:

Whatever our disappointments with some of the Republican candidates this year, winning control of Congress requires us to elect as many Republicans as possible. Better still, we have the opportunity to re-elect two solid conservatives in Kevin Hern and Josh Brecheen. No Senate races this year, and Frank Lucas was re-elected in the primary because only Republicans filed in the 3rd District.

1st Congressional District: Kevin Hern (R)
2nd Congressional District: Josh Brecheen (R)
4th Congressional District: Tom Cole (R)
5th Congressional District: Stephanie Bice (R)

State Legislature:

State Senate 3: Julie McIntosh (R)
State Senate 7: Warren Hamilton (R)
State Senate 15: Lisa Standridge (R)
State Senate 21: Randy Grellner (R)
State Senate 25: Brian Guthrie (R)
State Senate 33: Christie Gillespie (R)
State Senate 35: Dean Martin (R)
State Senate 37: Aaron Reinhardt (R)
State Senate 39: Dave Rader (R)
State Senate 43: Kendall Sacchieri (R)
State Senate 46: Charles Barton (R)
State Senate 47: Kelly E. Hines (R)

State House 1: Victoria Lawhorn (L)
State House 12: Mark Chapman (R)
State House 20: Jonathan Wilk (R)
State House 34: Andrew Muchmore (R)
State House 39: Richard Prawdzienski (L)
State House 41: Denise Crosswhite Hader (R)
State House 43: Jay Steagall (R)
State House 45: Matt Watson (R)
State House 46: Alex Torvi (R)
State House 64: Rande Worthen (R)
State House 66: Clay Staires (R)
State House 70: Brad Banks (R)
State House 79: Paul Hassink (R)
State House 83: Eric Roberts (R)
State House 86: David Hardin (R)
State House 87: Dave Schnittger (R)
State House 88: Bobby McCollum (I)
State House 90: Emily Gise (R)
State House 94: Suzanne Jobe (R)
State House 95: Max Wolfley (R)
State House 98: Gabe Woolley (R)
State House 100: Marilyn Stark (R)

No endorsement in House 4, 16, 26, 37, 38, 62, 63, 74, 84, 85, where a GOP incumbent has failing grades from the Oklahoma Constitution newspaper and/or OCPA, and yet the alternative is unappealing.

County:

Tulsa County Clerk: Michael Willis (R)
Tulsa County Commissioner District 2: Lonnie Sims (R)

Judicial Retention

In parentheses are party of voter registration, age, and appointing governor. Nigh and Henry are Democrats, Keating, Fallin, and Stitt are Republicans. An asterisk* indicates that other conservative voices disagree with my conclusion on that judge.

Supreme Court retention:

Noma Gurich (R, 72, Henry): NO
Yvonne Kauger (I, 87, Nigh): NO
James Edmondson (D, 79, Henry): NO

Court of Criminal Appeals retention:

William J. Musseman (R, 52, Stitt): YES
Scott Rowland (R, 60, Fallin): YES*
David B. Lewis (R, 66, Henry): NO

Court of Civil Appeals retention:

James R. Huber (R, 56, Stitt): YES
Timothy J. Downing (R, 45, Stitt): YES
Thomas E. Prince (R, 67, Stitt): YES
Robert D. Bell (R, 57, Henry): YES*
E. Bay Mitchell III (R, 70, Keating): YES
Brian Jack Goree (R, 60, Fallin): YES*

MORE INFORMATION:

OFFICIAL INFORMATION:

• Oklahoma State Election Board
• Tulsa County Election Board
• Oklahoma Ethics Commission Guardian campaign finance database
• City of Tulsa campaign contribution reports

OTHER CONSERVATIVE VOICES:

Here are some blogs, endorsement lists, candidate questionnaires, and sources of information for your consideration.

• Muskogee Politico news, questionnaires, and analysis
• Muskogee Politico endorsements and recommendations
• Muskogee Politico on the judicial retention ballot
• Steve Fair
• Oklahoma Constitution Index: Scores incumbent legislators on voting record
• OCPA legislative scorecard
• OCPA judicial scorecard
• iVoterGuide surveys of Oklahoma statewide, federal, and legislative candidates
• City Elders Tulsa speakers' videos, including candidate speeches
• Oklahomans for Life candidate surveys
• Oklahomans for the 2nd Amendment (OK2A) endorsements
• NRA-PVF endorsements
• Oklahomans for Health and Parental Rights (OKHPR) general election voter guide
• OCPAC Action: Judicial retention and state question recommendations
• Oklahoma Values Coalition

ANTI-CONSERVATIVE VOICES:

The Left is getting cagier about hiding its endorsements from conservatives, particularly in non-partisan races, but Blue Voter Guide will show you which candidates have received endorsements from leftist organizations -- follow that link and enter your zip code. Monroe Nichols has a lot of them. (Blue Voter Guide includes the Tulsa World editorial board as a leftist endorser.) Other negative indicators that will show up in campaign finance reports and social media:

• Oklahoma Public Employees Association: State government employees union can be counted on to support bigger, less-efficient government and higher taxes
• Oklahomans for Public Education: OPE advocates for higher taxes, opposes school choice, and opposes efforts to keep leftist advocacy out of the classroom. They work to defeat principled Republicans. A yellow warning mark from OPE is a badge of honor for a conservative candidate.
• Gun Sense Voter is an anti-2nd-Amendment voter rating
• Run for Something "is working with hundreds of young diverse progressives running for local office for the first time."

If you appreciate the many hours of research that went into this guide and into the rest of my election coverage, and if you'd like to help keep this site online, you can contribute to BatesLine's upkeep via PayPal. In addition to keeping me caffeinated, donated funds pay for web hosting, subscriptions, and paid databases I use for research. Many thanks to those generous readers who have already contributed.

Published 2024/10/28 and post-dated to remain at the top of the blog through election day.

I've already published my picks for all the races, but here's a quick discussion of Oklahoma's statewide and legislative seats on the November 5, 2024, ballot:

Corporation Commission: I'm voting for Libertarian nominee Chad Williams. As I wrote in June, a vote for Brian Bingman, the Republican nominee and former State Senate President Pro Tempore, is a vote for total regulatory capture. Oklahomans, sadly, must assume that, as a corporation commissioner, Bingman will do what he did in the State Senate -- take care of the lobbyists who got him elected and not the consumers who depend on the Corporation Commission to protect our interests from the monopoly utility companies. It's basic public-choice theory: Concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs. The companies that stand to make a financial killing from favorable Corporation Commission decisions have an incentive to pour money into the race to get their man elected. Chad Williams, the Libertarian nominee, served as a city councilor in Choctaw and has served as the state chairman of the Libertarian Party. Here are Williams's priorities, as listed on his Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey:

I am not running for office as a stepping stone to higher political ambitions. My commitment is to serve and address the immediate needs and concerns of Oklahomans. I am here to make a tangible difference in the present, not to use this position as a mere launching pad for personal advancement. My focus is on effective governance and real results, not on climbing the political ladder.

I would like to see a shift towards performance-based regulation (PBR) where utilities are rewarded for meeting specific performance metrics such as service quality, efficiency improvements, and customer satisfaction, rather than merely reimbursing costs. This can incentivize utilities to innovate and improve service delivery.

As we continue to advance technologically, it becomes increasingly imperative to reevaluate and update our regulatory frameworks to reflect the current state of technology and market dynamics. Older technologies, like landlines and cotton gins, once pivotal in shaping our industrial and communication landscapes, now operate in vastly different contexts. It is time to consider the deregulation of these sectors to foster innovation, reduce unnecessary bureaucratic overhead, and better allocate resources to more current and emerging technologies. By reducing the regulatory burden on these older technologies, we can encourage more efficient and competitive market conditions, ultimately benefiting both the economy and consumers.

Elsewhere, Williams has pointed out that Oklahoma's overregulation of cotton gins sends cotton producers in southwest Oklahoma over the border to Texas to process their crops. Williams's answers are thoughtful and creative, showing a willingness to balance the benefits of deregulation against the need to keep monopoly utility companies in check.

State Senate and State House:

In general, I've endorsed the Republican nominee, but there are 10 State House races where I made no recommendation at all because the incumbent's ratings by the conservative, free-market sources are dismal, and yet there wasn't a better alternative on the ballot. I hate to give a liberal Democrat any kind of a foothold on the political ladder, but the House Republican Caucus might be better off without some of these people. There is no danger of the Republican Party losing its overwhelming House majority. In two other races, although I disagree with them on a number of issues, Libertarian candidates Victoria Lawhorn (House 1) and Richard Prawdzienski (House 39) would add a couple of principled opponents to corporate welfare to the House ranks in place of some unimpressive RINO incumbents.

While Republicans are doing well statewide, we are seeing once reliable Republican districts in the City of Tulsa turning into swing districts or worse. Several of these districts didn't even draw Republican candidates. Seven City of Tulsa House seats, covering all of Tulsa north of 71st Street between the Arkansas River, Gilcrease Museum Road, and US 169, are represented by Democrats. That's all of midtown and all of north Tulsa.

We have a good shot at retaking two midtown and southeast Tulsa seats that used to be reliably Republican but are now in liberal Democrat hands. Both of these involve rematches, where the Republican nominees, Brad Banks in District 70 and Paul Hassink in District 79, are making a second attempt with the help of lessons learned from 2022 and a presidential race that should boost Republican turnout. Both men are engineers (Banks is a civil engineer, Hassink an electrical engineer), and Oklahoma needs legislators with an engineer's analytical skills and experience in building things that work.

Republican nominee Brad Banks, 41, is a civil engineer and the married father of four young children. He served in the US Marine Corps for five years, serving in the Western Pacific with 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, and then in Marine Security Guard Batallion in Lagos, Nigeria, and at the US embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. After his honorable discharge as a sergeant, he obtained a degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas-San Antonio, working in infrastructure design and management. From 2013 to 2018, Banks was Manager of Operations for the City of Tulsa-Rogers County Port Authority at the Tulsa Port of Catoosa. He worked with legislators to pass bills that would facilitate ground transportation of cargo coming to or from barges at the port. He is now in private practice with his civil engineering firm, Bridgewater Engineering, and his construction firm, Eagle Eye Construction, which specializes in concrete, drainage, grading, and fencing work.... Banks has been is strongly pro-life, supportive of the right to keep and bear arms, and opposed to medical mandates and oppressive lockdowns. Banks has been endorsed by OK2A and OKHPR.

Republican challenger Paul Hassink is an electrical engineer with degrees from Georgia Tech and Purdue and has special concern for the security and resilience of Oklahoma's power grid. Hassink has the endorsement of OK2A and OKHPR -- [incumbent] Provenzano has F grades from both of those organizations. Republican Paul Hassink's background in engineering and his consistent conservative principles will make him a great asset for Oklahomans in the Legislature.

The two Democrat incumbents both work in the non-profit sector, and both are heavily funded by political action committees, both labor unions and chambercrats, and by progressive plutocrat George Kaiser and his network.

On the Senate side, Senate District 39 Republican incumbent Dave Rader, running for his final term, is getting battered by dark-money pro-abortion ads. Sen. Rader has not been as conservative as I would like, but he's pro-life, and he's far better than the alternative, and we should not lose a south Tulsa seat to the Democrats. Dean Martin is attempting to recover Senate 35, a long-time GOP seat that was won by liberal Democrat Jo Anna Dossett after a bitter Republican primary in 2020. Martin had no primary this year but has been running hard since the beginning of the year. I endorsed him in his 2012 run for Tulsa County Clerk and am happy to have the chance to vote for him again. The redrawing of district lines has turned two elongated N-S districts (35 along the river, 39 between Harvard and Sheridan) into two compact E-W districts, with 35 covering midtown Tulsa between the river and Memorial north of I-44.

Republican candidates for open Senate seats in suburban south Tulsa County should have an easy time of it: Christie Gillespie in Senate 33 (Broken Arrow), Brian Guthrie in Senate 25 (Bixby and far south Tulsa), and Aaron Reinhardt (west Tulsa and Jenks). Reinhardt defeated a Republican incumbent in the primary and has only an independent opponent in the general.

Oklahoma has no U. S. Senate races this year -- Markwayne Mullin will face the voters in 2026, James Lankford in 2028 -- but four of our five House seats have general election contests. District 3 Congressman Frank Lucas drew only Republican opponents and won re-election in the June primary.

For me as a conservative voter, the best possible outcome of the November congressional elections is a Republican majority with members of the House Freedom Caucus holding the balance of power and able to hold House leadership accountable to conservative principles. With the House so narrowly divided, Republicans can't afford to lose any of what ought to be safe seats, like the five in Oklahoma. So I urge my readers to vote to re-elect Kevin Hern, Josh Brecheen (a Freedom Caucus member), Tom Cole, and Stephanie Bice.

Quite apart from the calculus of party control, Kevin Hern and Josh Brecheen deserve another term for effectively upholding Oklahoma values in the House.

2nd District Congressman Josh Brecheen is finishing his first term. Conservative groups give him the highest rating of any Federal legislator in the state, with 100% from CPAC Foundation and 98% from Heritage Action for America. As a newly sworn-in House member, Brecheen was part of a small group who used their leverage over Kevin McCarthy's re-election as speaker to force McCarthy to agree to rules changes in favor of transparency and the empowerment of individual members. Brecheen was a field representative for Sen. Tom Coburn prior to his own election to the Oklahoma State Senate and has demonstrated a Coburn-like courage to resist peer pressure and stand for fiscal sanity.

Kevin Hern has been an effective conservative legislator who has gained the respect of his peers. He has ratings of 96% from CPAC Foundation and 91% from Heritage Action. He is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the conservative congressional policy group within the House Republican caucus, and he was nominated for Speaker twice in 2023. Beyond his official duties, Hern and his family have been generous donors to Tulsa Classical Academy, Oklahoma's first classical charter school. (Disclosure: I serve on the board of Tulsa Classical Academy.) Hern has been a stalwart supporter of freedom of speech and religious liberty, effective border security, and 2nd Amendment rights.

Hern has two general election opponents, Democrat Dennis Baker and independent Mark Sanders. Baker is a former FBI agent who proudly announces his support for two of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history: Roe v. Wade and McGirt v. Oklahoma. Sanders is an attorney originally from Tulsa who returned to practice here with Gable Gotwals after many years in Connecticut.

I have known Mark Sanders since high school. He was a couple of years ahead of me at Holland Hall, and he and I were part of a morning prayer group that met before the school day began. Since his return to Tulsa, we've had a number of good conversations on urban issues and local history. When he told me he was running for Congress, I thought it was a shame that he wasn't running for mayor instead. (This was before Brent Van Norman entered the race.)

I was surprised that Sanders opted to run for Congress as an independent. Legislative bodies larger than, say, three members will form factions, and with more than a few dozen members, there will be party caucuses, with the majority party in control of the flow of legislation and the organization and leadership of committees. Forty years ago, a blue-collar, pro-life Boston voter might choose Republican Ronald Reagan for President and Democrat Tip O'Neill for Congress, because, as O'Neill said, "All politics is local." A mere ten years later, Republicans under Newt Gingrich successfully nationalized the mid-term elections with the Contract with America, producing the first Republican House majority since the Eisenhower Administration. This year more than ever, I believe voters are going to vote not merely for the person who will represent them in the U. S. House but for the party who will control the House. It's not a good year to be an independent candidate.

Although there are four independents in the Senate -- Krysten Sinema of Arizona, Angus King of Maine, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia -- all four caucus with the Democrats, all four are up for re-election this year, and two, Sinema and Manchin, are not seeking re-election. Individual Senators have prerogatives that are not dependent on party caucus standing, but this is not the case in the House. The House currently has no independents. The only true case of a House member elected as an independent in my lifetime is Bernie Sanders.

Much of Mark Sanders's platform would not be out of place in the Democrat Party. He supports a cap-and-trade carbon tax to combat global warming, abolition of partisan congressional elections, an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, six weeks paid family leave per year, single-payer health care, and a "steeply graduated" wealth tax to replace the income tax. He wants a constitutional amendment to overturn the Valeo and Citizens United decisions, permitting greater restrictions on visible flows of money in politics.

Sanders takes some more conservative and Trump-aligned positions as well. He would ban social media accounts for children under 18 and require strict 18+ age verification for access to pornographic websites. He wants a negotiated end to the Ukraine conflict. He supports tariffs to "repatriate our industrial base." He supports term limits of 6 years -- three terms in the House and one term in the Senate.

Sanders rightly acknowledges the mess created by McGirt, but his solution is to convene a summit. (The straightforward solution is to have Congress disestablish, in a idiot-Gorsuch-proof way, the reservations that Congress had disestablished 117 years ago, as everyone at the time -- federal, state, and tribal officials alike -- understood. But that would require a degree of courage, given the amount of casino money tribal governments have to offer politicians and their potential opponents.)

As of the end of September, Sanders had raised $48,198.51 and spent $30,776.51. By comparison, Hern had over a million dollars cash on hand, and Baker had raised $261,393.97 and spent $149,527.88. Sanders's major donors include Robin Flint Ballenger, City-Council-suer Burt Holmes, and Frederic Dorwart, the attorney to the Kaiser System. Sanders's wife, Sarah Poston, is an attorney with Dorwart's firm, and several other Dorwart attorneys are donors as well.

Tulsa County voters have one county-wide race and one county commission seat on the November 5, 2024, ballot. In both races, the Republican is the better candidate.

The County Clerk is responsible for record keeping for the county, including deeds, liens, mortgages, and other records pertaining to real property, agendas and minutes of authorities, boards, and commissions, and financial records for all county offices. Tulsa County Clerk office has five divisions: Accounting, Administration and Support, Budget and Finance, Payroll, and Real Estate Services, plus the executive staff. It's a large office with a lot of responsibility.

Incumbent Tulsa County Clerk Michael Willis, the Republican nominee, has improved that office by leaps and bounds in his eight years as clerk, making more information easily accessible to the public on the Tulsa County Clerk website. As someone who delves into local history, I appreciate the easy access to subdivision plats and historic deed indexes. The one aspect that could be improved is access to backup materials that are provided to public officials in connection with agenda items. Often it is impossible to tell what an agenda item is really all about in the absence of backup materials. The City of Tulsa does a fairly good job of this, as do public records in other states; Tulsa County could do better.

Many Republicans, including myself, were disappointed in Willis's choice to stay silent during the Tulsa mayoral primary, in which conservative Republican Brent Van Norman fell just short of making the runoff. As a consequence, Tulsa Republicans have a Hobson's choice between two Democrats, one of whom is Willis's old boss, Karen Keith. Willis has endorsed Keith over Monroe Nichols in the runoff; a Keith mailer this week features endorsements from Willis, former County Commissioner John Smaligo, County Treasurer John Fothergill, and Fred Davis, campaign commercial producer and nephew of Jim Inhofe. (The other side of this mailer uses of a photo of the late Sen. Jim Inhofe with Keith, inscribed, "You Karen Keith are not only my favorite Democrat but my hero.")

Nevertheless, Michael Willis has done a great job as county clerk, and I'd like him to continue serving in that role.

In Oklahoma, every county has three commissioners, elected by district to serve four-year terms, with elections for District 1 and 3 commissioners in gubernatorial election years and for District 2 commissioners in presidential election years. Tulsa County District 2 includes the western arm of the county, midtown Tulsa, Tulsa west of the river, and the City of Jenks. A County Commissioner is responsible for maintaining the county road network in his district and also sits on boards overseeing general county government.

This is a ticket-splitting district. Of the 83,782 registered voters who have gone to the polls in the last four years, 37,836 are Republican, 31,130 are Democrat, 14,132 are Independent, 684 are Libertarian. Of the 14,145 who have registered since November 2022 but have never voted, 5,613 are Independent, 4,846 are Republican, 3,422 are Democrat, and 264 are Libertarian.

In the 2022 election, Democrat governor nominee Joy Hofmeister got 54% of the District 2 vote over Kevin Stitt, but Republican Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell got 58%. Congressman Kevin Hern had 53% over Adam Martin. Jena Nelson Sen. Lankford got 50% to 46% for Madison Horn in Lankford's bid for re-election, but Kendra Horn edged out Markwayne Mullin, 48.6% to 48.0%. Democrat State Superintendent candidate Jena Nelson had 54% over Ryan Walters, but the district supported Republican Todd Russ for State Treasurer and Leslie Osborn for Labor Commissioner.

The 16-year Democrat incumbent Tulsa County Commissioner Karen Keith is running for Mayor of Tulsa, leaving an open seat. State Rep. Lonnie Sims won a hard-fought runoff to become the Republican nominee. Sims's current State House District 68 overlaps with a large section of District 2. I am underwhelmed by his legislative voting record, as rated by conservative organizations, including his co-authorship of what became SQ 833, and I endorsed his opponent Melissa Myers in the primary and runoff, and he's using the same campaign consulting firm as Democrat Karen Keith. Nevertheless, Sims is the better choice in the general election. Sims has worked closely with Tulsa County government to fund repair of the Arkansas River levees, which are all within County Commission District 2. He is familiar with the duties of the County Commission and is more conservative than his opponent by a long chalk.

The Democrat nominees in these two county elections are both young women who embrace the usual leftist causes and appear to have no background or knowledge that would qualify them to serve in the offices they seek. My impression is that they are running not to win, but to gain some campaign experience and name recognition and to force Republicans to spend money on these seats that might otherwise go to legislative and local races. They may be able to parlay that experience and exposure into a successful future run for a state legislative or city council seat.

The Democrat nominee for Tulsa County Clerk, Don Nuam, is a newcomer to politics, and a relative newcomer to the United States. Born in Myanmar, she has been a Tulsa resident since 2008, is a graduate of Jenks High School, and is active in Burmese cultural organizations. She is working on a master's degree in psychology. Her LinkedIn profile says that she works as a VITA Specialist for Goodwill; the acronym seems to refer to their Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. She writes, "While I may not have traditional experience in the role of County Clerk, what I lack in experience, I make up for in enthusiasm, dedication, and a fresh perspective."

The Democrat nominee for District 2 Tulsa County Commissioner is Sarah Gray, who defeated Keith's Chief Deputy Jim Rea in the primary and former Tulsa City Councilor Maria Barnes in the runoff. Gray's website doesn't exhibit much awareness of the responsibilities of the office, although she does have a page summarizing the scandal at the juvenile justice center. Her Ballotpedia profile states, "I work in communications and public relations in Tulsa and throughout Oklahoma - specializing in civic engagement, media relations, and Tribal affairs. I have a B.A. in political science and M.A. in strategic communications."

(Gray's website incorrectly states that Tulsa County overlaps the Osage reservation. The Osage reservation is underground and consists of the mineral rights of Osage County, held by the Osage Nation on behalf of its citizens, who hold headrights in its revenues. Surface rights are not part of the reservation and can be bought and sold freely. The enabling act for Oklahoma statehood required the Osage reservation to be its own county, the largest in the new state.)

Earlier this evening, I sent the following email to Karen Keith and Monroe Nichols, the two Democrats who advanced to the November 5, 2024, runoff for Mayor of Tulsa.

The idea was inspired by conversations I had with the two candidates after last month's forum hosted by Women for Tulsa at the Campbell Hotel. I pointed out to both that the Supreme Court's Castro-Huerta ruling limited the scope of the McGirt ruling and signalled that SCOTUS would likely find in favor of the State of Oklahoma and its political subdivisions should further tribal challenges to their authority reach the High Court. McGirt happened because Neil Gorsuch sided with the four SCOTUS progressives to form a majority of five, but after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, Gorsuch and the remaining three progressives only formed a minority of four in the Castro-Huerta case.

For example, say the owner of a restaurant in Tulsa, a tribal citizen, decides not to collect or remit state, county, and city sales taxes. After Oklahoma Tax Commission padlocks the door, this tribal citizen files a federal lawsuit challenging the authority of Oklahoma and its political subdivisions to collect taxes on an Indian-owned enterprise on Indian-owned land in an Indian reservation. If the case were to reach SCOTUS, the High Court as currently constituted would almost certainly uphold the taxing power of state and city, notwithstanding "reservation" status. But that would only happen if the City of Tulsa and State of Oklahoma pursue the case aggressively in the courts, even if district court and appeals court rulings go the other way. When I asked Rep. Nichols if he would defend Tulsa's power to collect sales tax, he indicated that he would, of course! This questionnaire is designed to give him and his opponent the opportunity to say so in writing and to commit themselves publicly on other issues that really ought to be no-brainers.

I will let you know if I hear back from the candidates. I will also be tweeting these questions out on X, to make sure they're seen.

To the surviving candidates for Mayor of Tulsa:

The elimination of all conservative mayoral candidates in the August 27 election has left me and a third of the city's electorate in a quandary. We will show up in large numbers on November 5 to vote for Donald Trump, Kevin Hern, and other Republican candidates, but we don't yet have a compelling reason to vote in the mayor's race. Nevertheless, if one of you is willing to commit publicly to at least some of the actions below and the other is not, it would make a difference in how conservatives vote.

I know you're busy campaigning, so I'll keep this short and simple. Please reply at your earliest convenience to the following yes/no questions. I will post the responses (or lack of response) verbatim on BatesLine.com. You can feel free to explain or elaborate, but I'm looking for a yes or no answer. The heart of each question is "will you pledge?" and the more "yes" answers you can honestly give, the more inclined conservatives will be to vote for you on November 5.

Thank you for your time.

Section A: City authority in light of McGirt

Background for questions 1 - 4: The challenge to the City's authority to tax, regulate land use, and enforce traffic laws is not likely to come from the tribal governments directly, but, as with the McGirt case, tribal citizens will file federal lawsuits seeking exemption from state and local laws, which tribal governments will join as amici curiae.

1. If a tribal citizen sues in Federal court to claim exemption from the City of Tulsa's zoning laws, will you pledge to commit the City's resources to defend in Federal court the City's power to enforce its zoning laws over all property within its municipal limits, pursuing the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States if necessary?

2. If a tribal citizen sues in Federal court to claim exemption from the City of Tulsa's traffic laws, will you pledge to commit the City's resources to defend in Federal court the City's power to enforce its traffic laws on all drivers within its municipal limits, pursuing the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States if necessary?

3. If a tribal citizen with a retail business sues in Federal court to claim exemption from collecting and remitting state, county, and city sales taxes, will you pledge to commit the City's resources to defend in Federal court the City's taxing authority within its municipal limits, pursuing the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States if necessary?

4. If property owner who is a tribal citizen sues in Federal court to claim exemption from paying ad valorem tax, will you pledge to commit the City's resources to defend in Federal court the City's taxing authority within its municipal limits, pursuing the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States if necessary?

Section B: City involvement in controversial cultural issues

5. The City Council and Mayor Bynum approved the use of Federal COVID relief funds for Amplify Tulsa to survey 15-17 year old children about their "sexual health and well-being." Will you pledge to veto any proposal that gives any funds under the City's control for the purpose of communicating with minors about sexual matters?

6. Mayor Bynum used an executive order to add "gender identity" and "gender expression" to the City's non-discrimination policy. The idea that someone can be "born in the wrong body" or "born the wrong gender" has no basis in science, and it has led vulnerable youth to damage their bodies with cross-sex hormones and surgery. Will you pledge to remove "gender identity" and "gender expression" from the City's non-discrimination policy?

7. Will you pledge to enact and enforce city policies that exclude all biological males (including purported "transwomen" and "non-binary") from private female spaces and activities, such as restrooms, locker rooms, shelters, and city sports leagues?

8. Will you pledge never to require city employees to participate in Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) training sessions, which have proven to sow mistrust and division among an organization's employees?

Section C: Taxes

9. Improve Our Tulsa 3, passed in 2023, has already obligated our current sales tax and property tax rates beyond 2028. Will you pledge not to put a general obligation bond issue or sales tax proposal before the voters during your four-year term of office?

[I was manually numbering these questions, and left room for another question that I didn't end up writing. Oh, well.]

Section D: Law enforcement

11. Citizen oversight panels have been used in many cities to second-guess the split-second decisions made by police officers in the line of duty. This has reduced proactive policing, causing police officers to hesitate to act decisively against crime, leading to an increase in crime in those cities. Will you pledge to veto any proposal to create a citizen oversight panel for the Tulsa Police Department?

12. In 2020, under activist pressure, Mayor Bynum ended the Tulsa Police Department's relationship with Live PD, which showcased TPD's professionalism in difficult and dangerous circumstances. Will you pledge to authorize TPD to resume cooperation with Live PD and similar network television shows?

13. For many years, the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office has had a 287(g) agreement with ICE. According to the ICE website: "The 287(g) program allows ICE -- through the delegation of specified immigration officer duties -- to enhance collaboration with state and local law enforcement partners to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of noncitizens who undermine the safety of our nation's communities and the integrity of U.S. immigration laws." Will you pledge to have the Tulsa Police Department participate in the 287(g) program to the fullest extent possible for city governments?

Section E: Homelessness

14. The Housing, Homelessness & Mental Health Task Force, which oversees the $75 million in IOT3 funds set aside to address homelessness in Tulsa, does not include anyone who works directly with homeless people. Will you pledge to add leaders of Christian ministries that serve the homeless (e.g., John 3:16 Mission, City of Hope) to that task force?

15. Will you pledge to enact and enforce ordinances that prohibit camping on public property and panhandling, requiring those convicted to enter a diversion program or else face jail?

Section F: Public health

16. The mandatory closure of businesses, schools, churches, and other gathering places, and the imposition of social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 epidemic proved to be ineffective at preventing the spread of the disease but disastrous to the economic and social well-being of Tulsans. In the event of a similar respiratory pandemic, will you pledge not to seek or use emergency powers to require Tulsa businesses, churches, schools, and other gathering places to close?

17. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are now known not to prevent the spread of that virus, and its efficacy at mitigating the severity of the virus is questionable, at best short-lived and decreasing with each new variant. Severe adverse effects, including myocarditis and pericarditis in young men, have come to light. Many government workers were faced with a choice of taking the vaccine against their will or losing their jobs. Will you pledge never to mandate a vaccine as a condition of employment with the City of Tulsa?

### END ###

A parting thought: If I were to say that someone like Kevin Stitt should have twice as much say in how Tulsa is run than someone like Monroe Nichols, or that Stitt and Nichols should be treated differently if accused of a crime, because of their respective ancestry, I'd be accused of racism, and rightly so. But that is what tribal co-governance is all about. Stitt had an ancestor on the Dawes Commission roll, Francis Dawson. If I've found the right Dawson, he was enrolled with a blood quantum of 1/16. If that's Stitt's great-great-grandfather, and assuming no other Indian ancestors, that makes Stitt's blood quantum 1/256: One Cherokee ancestor 8 generations ago entitles him to special rights, regardless of the degree of engagement he has with Cherokee culture.

The second and simplest state question on Oklahoma's November 5, 2024, ballot is SQ 834. It would modify the language of Article III, Section 1, of the Oklahoma Constitution:

Subject to such exceptions as the Legislature may prescribe, all only citizens of the United States, who are over the age of eighteen (18) years, and who are bona fide residents of this state, are qualified electors of this state.

If SQ 834 passes, the section will read:

Subject to such exceptions as the Legislature may prescribe, only citizens of the United States who are over the age of eighteen (18) years and who are bona fide residents of this state are qualified electors of this state.

The gist you will see on the ballot is:

This measure amends Section 1 of Article 3 of the Oklahoma Constitution. It clarifies that only citizens of the United States are qualified to vote in this state.

SQ834 began life as SJR 23, with a long list of coauthors. It passed the Senate 37-7 and passed the House 71-11. Among Tulsa Democrats, Reps. Suzanne Schreiber, John Waldron, Meloyde Blancett, and Regina Goodwin, and Sens. Jo Anna Dossett and Kevin Matthews voted no. Reps. Monroe Nichols (candidate for Tulsa mayor), Melissa Provenzano, and Amanda Swope did not vote.

The current language leaves open the possibility that a charter city might allow non-citizens to vote in city elections. Stating that all citizens are qualified electors doesn't exclude the possibility that non-citizens might also be qualified electors. The new language closes off that possibility, unless the Legislature itself permitted it.

I'd rather "subject to such exceptions" spelled out what types of exceptions would be reasonable. I assume those would only be excluding felons from voting. I'd prefer something like: "Subject to such exceptions as the Legislature may prescribe depriving felons of the vote, all citizens of the United States, and only citizens of the United States, who are over the age of eighteen (18) years and who are bona fide residents of this state are qualified electors of this state."

Nevertheless, this is an improvement over the existing language, and I will be voting YES.

Oklahoma has two state questions on the November 5, 2024, ballot. The first and most controversial and confusing is State Question 833. I have this uneasy feeling that the proposal is not so much about solving problems for cities or even for developers as it is about creating a new market for financial services companies. I'm voting NO on SQ 833.

Here is the gist that appears on the ballot:

STATE QUESTION NO. 833 LEGISLATIVE REFERENDUM NO. 376

This measure adds a new section, section 9E, to article 10 of the Oklahoma Constitution. Section 9E will permit the creation of public infrastructure districts to provide support, organization, operation, and maintenance of services. To create such a district, proponents for creating the district must file a petition with the municipality. The petition must include the signatures of one hundred percent of all surface property owners falling within the district's proposed boundaries. The municipality possesses the right to impose limitations on the district's powers prior to approving the district. Once approved, the district will be governed by a board of trustees.

Through the board, the district may issue bonds to pay for all or part of all public improvements implemented by and for the public infrastructure district. The district will be limited to issuing bonds issued for such improvements not exceeding ten (10) mills. For repayment of the bonds, the district, acting through its board of trustees, will levy and assess a special assessment on all property benefiting from the improvements in the district. Section 9E also authorizes the Legislature to enact laws necessary for the implementation of public infrastructure districts.

This question is a legislative referendum, which means the state legislature approved a joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment, which must then be ratified by the voters. SJR 16 was authored by Sen. John Haste, R-Broken Arrow, Rep. Terry O'Donnell, R-Catoosa, and Rep. Lonnie Sims, R-Jenks, who is the Republican nominee for Tulsa County Commission District 2. The resolution passed the Senate 38-7, with most of the consistent conservatives (e.g., Dahm, Deevers, Hamilton, Jett) voting no, and passed the House 66-27, again with most of the consistent conservatives (e.g., Banning, Gann, Olsen) voting against. Some usually reliable conservatives voted yes in both houses (e.g. Prieto, Crosswhite Hader), but I also notice lots of prominent Democrat names on the yes side (e.g., Provenzano, Schreiber, Dossett, Nichols, Blancett).

Here is the language that will be added to Article X of the State Constitution if SQ 833 passes:

Section 9E. A. There are hereby created public infrastructure districts.

B. Municipalities may approve the creation of public infrastructure districts, which may incur indebtedness and issue public infrastructure district bonds to pay for all or part of the cost of public improvements within such districts. The cost of all indebtedness so incurred shall be levied and assessed by the board of trustees of a public infrastructure district on the property benefited by such improvements following the passage and approval of the organization of a public infrastructure district pursuant to subsection C of this section. The board shall collect the special assessments so levied and use the same to reimburse the public infrastructure district for the amount paid or to be paid by it on the bonds issued for such improvements not to exceed ten (10) mills for the purpose of providing funds for the purpose of support, organization, operation, and maintenance of such services.

C. A public infrastructure district shall not be created unless a petition is filed with the municipality that contains the signatures of one hundred percent (100%) of surface property owners within the applicable area consenting to the creation of the public infrastructure district.

D. The municipality may impose limitations on the powers of the public infrastructure district through the governing document presented by the public infrastructure district applicant.

E. The levy shall be in addition to all other levies authorized by this Constitution, and when approved, shall be made for the repayment of public infrastructure district bonds issued by the public infrastructure districts for the public improvements agreed upon by the voters of the district as provided by the governing document.

F. The Legislature shall be authorized to enact such laws as may be necessary in order to implement public infrastructure districts in this state.

Reading between the lines to think through how this would work:

A public infrastructure district (PID) would likely be set up by a single property owner, since the consent of 100% of property owners is required. The property owner would be the proponent and would develop the governing document for the public infrastructure, which would presumably spell out the number, terms, and process for appointment of the trustees.

Only a municipality can approve a public infrastructure district, but nothing in this amendment says that the infrastructure district has to be within that municipality's limits. (That may be implied by other law, but it ought to be spelled out here.) It says the municipality may impose limitations in the district's powers, but the only power authorized in this section is to incur indebtedness and issue bonds. Perhaps a limitation would include capping indebtedness or restricting what improvements could be financed in this way. The limit of 10 mills implies that the assessments must be ad valorem, based on property value, rather than some other measure, such as linear street frontage, land area, or proximity to amenities.

There's nothing in the amendment to specify how trustees should be appointed or how to disband a PID once it has served its purpose.

This would appear to be a way for a private property owner to sell tax-exempt bonds rather than taxable bonds, without having to ask a city or county industrial authority to issue conduit debt on his behalf.

Sen. Haste and Rep. O'Donnell issued a press release after SJR 16 passed the House in April.

"Oklahoma has a housing shortage across the state, and we know one of the most significant barriers to new homes is the need to build the necessary infrastructure to support them," Haste said. "PIDs will help our municipalities finance the infrastructure to handle our state's growth."

It's noteworthy that Haste and O'Donnell's districts overlap in the section of Wagoner County within Tulsa's city limits.

OpenSecrets has not identified any committees supporting or opposing the measure. A search of independent expenditures and state question expenditures on the Oklahoma Ethics Commission's website turns up nothing.

Utah has Public Infrastructure Districts, but they do not appear to be limited to municipalities. Here is a Salt Lake City TV news report on the use of Public Infrastructure Districts by the Utah Inland Port Authority and the website for a pair of PIDs, one residential, one commercial, called ROAM in Morgan County, Utah.

D. A. Davidson, a Denver-based financial services company, has a Special District Group that works with cities and developers to set up PIDs; their presentation, explaining PIDs and providing examples, is included in the minutes for the July 11, 2024, Millville, Utah, City Council meeting. Here is a draft policy statement from the City of Toquerville, Utah, setting out the basis on which PIDs would be established by the city; document metadata indicates it was written by Laci Knowles, a managing director of D. A. Davidson's Special District Group. I found her name on several similar policy statements from other cities.

(By the way, Utah has a website for collecting every public notice issued by every public body in the state, including municipalities. The search engine could be better, but this is a great idea.)

Texas has Public Improvement Districts, which are municipal. Here is an analysis of Public Improvement Districts by John Whitsell, the City Manager of Chandler, Texas; it sounds very similar to what is proposed in SQ833.

I ran searches for Public Infrastructure District and Public Improvement District on the websites of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), two organizations that develop model legislation that state legislators reuse and adapt to local circumstances, and could find no reference to either concept.

The general idea seems to be that a developer would be able to have the city issue bonds on its behalf to fund a new subdivision's streets, sidewalks, sewers, waterlines, and common areas, and then the bonds are paid back by the assessments on the property owner(s) within the PID. This would be in lieu of the developer needing commercial financing for those costs as part of the overall financing for the project. This sort of infrastructure financing has been done with a TIF, but a TIF diverts the additional property tax or sales tax revenue generated by the development (e.g., Tulsa Hills, Jenks Outlet Mall) from taxing entities, while in a PID, the taxing entities would collect the entire millage, even on the increase in value, and the over-and-above PID assessment would go to repay the bonds. Someone buying a lot to build a home in a PID would pay more in property taxes over the years, even after his mortgage is paid off, instead of paying a higher price upfront (the infrastructure cost of the development would be rolled into the initial price).

It would help a lot to know who brought the idea to Sen. Haste and Rep. O'Donnell and who was lobbying for SJR 16. It looks like it would be a moneymaker for bond attorneys and bond underwriters. I did not find any Oklahoma lobbying expenses listing D. A. Davidson as a principal ("principal" is the lobbyist's client), but I could imagine that a financial services company might push to create this type of district to open up an entire state for new business opportunities.

Maybe there is some value to this idea, but the proposal needs more clarity, limitations, and safeguards. I plan to vote NO.

P.S. If you want to induce nausea, go to that Lobbyist Expenditure search page, enter the last name of a current legislator, and then look at the lobbyist column and be appalled and disgusted at the large number of former legislators who are trading on their legislative connections for the benefit of special interest groups. Maybe we'd be better off as a state if we paid departing legislators a big pension while banning them from serving as lobbyists.

UPDATE 2024/10/21: Former State Rep. Jason Murphey writes that SQ 833 creates a moral hazard:

SQ 833, if approved, would create yet another form of special government district. To be known as a Public Infrastructure District (PID) and in a massive giveaway to developers, city government could decide to allow a developer to put his property in a special district, issue large amounts of debt--much to the delight of the high-powered attorneys and bond underwriters who would make bank on this whole deal--and pay off that debt with years of excess property taxation, which would increase costs long after the developer has gotten out from under the development.

He notes the way that TIFs brought special interest money to elections for Logan County Commissioner and predicts that SQ 833 will have a similar effect:

Up to that time, local county commissioner campaigns, in our county, had been mostly free of special interest influence. Commissioners spent little in the way of campaign funds, and that limited money that was spent likely came from the candidate himself or from friends and family. Their election was determined by issues of the county budget, the ability to articulate a plan for improving county roads, and, in the best campaigns, putting forward an encouraging vision of meeting core needs while downsizing the size and scope of government and taxation.

But a few years ago, I took note of the particular deep-pocketed special interest, who had previously shown no interest in these races, dropping significant funds into the county campaign....

In my view, this donor's interest lay in receiving a very special, lucrative benefit: the declaration of a TIF that would raise the value of a property he sought to develop.

Here's the moral hazard:

The developers of the future will be divided into two classes: those who have the political pull to receive the immediate benefit, and those who aren't able or willing to play the political game and who, as a result, will be at a great disadvantage to those who are favored by the politicians.

The principled politicians of the future, subject to this tremendous pressure, will likely become fewer in number. Few will have the bandwidth to understand what is going on; the principle to know that the smallest and simplest government is the government that governs best; and the incredible self-control to not play the game, give in to temptation, and thrive on the role of being big government economic developers, which is no doubt very alluring to the small-time, local-level officeholder who, because of these laws, now gets to play ball with the developers and the powerful of society.

Murphey, who was term-limited in 2018, started a Substack earlier this year. He was one of the few state legislators to refuse any gift from any lobbyist or entity that employs lobbyists. (Rep. Tom Gann, R-Inola, has followed in his footsteps.) He is also one of the most analytical people ever to sit in the Oklahoma legislature, so what he has to say about the degenerate legislative culture at the State Capitol is essential reading. While any piece older than two months is behind a paywall, new pieces are available with a free subscription, and you can read his very first Substack piece, "These Are Not Serious People," as a guest column at the Oklahoma Constitution website.

All Oklahoma voters will have 12 judicial retention questions on the backside of the November 5, 2024, ballot. Unlike district judges, where competitors run in non-partisan elections, justices of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and judges on the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals are appointed, but face a retention ballot every six years. (I think unopposed district judges should also face a retention ballot.)

Oklahoma has two separate appeals systems. Decisions of the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals can be appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, while the Court of Criminal Appeals is the apex of Oklahoma's criminal court system. All of the appeals judges are appointed by the governor; the public has the opportunity to oust them at retention elections every 6 years.

In the 56-year history of Oklahoma's judicial retention elections, no judge or justice has ever been turned out of office by the voters. That may change this year.

The OCPA has produced an Oklahoma judicial scorecard, reachable at oklajudges.com. The nine current Oklahoma Supreme Court justices have been graded based on their ruling in selected cases. A description of OCPA's scoring methodology states:

To score well, a justice will join in opinions which respect their role as the interpreter--not maker--of law. As John Marshall said in Marbury v. Madison, "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." That means it's not the Court's role to say what the law should be. Furthermore, we score justices well who interpret the law based on the text as it was written by the legislature without finding ambiguity where none exists. In sum, we expect judicial officers to decide cases based on the facts and the law--not their own individual preferences.

The three justices on this year's retention ballot, Noma Gurich, Yvonne Kauger, and James Edmondson, have scores of 18%, 18%, and 22% respectively, exceeded only by Douglas Combs's 14%. All three voted in 2020 to override explicit language in the statute and allow absentee ballots to be accepted without notarization. In 2023, Gurich, Kauger, and Edmondson "found" a right to abortion in the emanationes et penumbrae of the Oklahoma Constitution, which nowhere mentions the barbaric practice which state statute prohibits. This year, the three plus Combs were on the anti-speech side of a free-speech case.

James Edmondson is the brother and former law partner of Drew Edmondson, former attorney general and 2018 Democrat nominee for governor. Yvonne Kauger and James Edmondson are the only two remaining justices who participated in the unjust 2006 decision to invalidate the Taxpayer Bill of Rights initiative petition without a hearing.

Governor Stitt's three appointees, Justices Kane, Kuehn, and Rowe, all score 80 or above. Stitt has done well with his judicial appointments, despite the involvement of a left-leaning private club in the nominating process; defeating Gurich, Kauger, and Edmondson would give Stitt three more appointments, leading, we hope, to a Supreme Court majority that applies the law as written.

The judicial scorecard does not extend to the two appellate courts. I plan to vote for all of Governor Stitt's appointments. While my default in the absence of any information is to vote no (to cancel out someone else who reflexively votes yes), I don't want, ignorantly, to turf out a judge who is doing a good job. I've reached out to attorney friends to get their sense on the appellate judges.

Criminal Appeals Judge David B. Lewis was on the wrong side of a 2023 ruling in a case involving an egregious violation of due-process rights in an Oklahoma County District Court murder case. According to the findings of fact in an evidentiary hearing, District Judge Timothy Henderson and Assistant District Attorney Kelly Collins were involved in a secret sexual relationship at the time the case was assigned to Henderson and at the time the first pre-trial hearing was held. District Court Judge Paul Hesse, who conducted the evidentiary hearing, wrote that it was immaterial that the affair had ended before the trial proper had occurred: "An unconstitutional potential for bias existed because Henderson could not have been neutral if he still had romantic feelings for Collins or if he feared that Collins might disclose their relationship out of frustration if she was dissatisfied with a ruling." Henderson was suspended in March 2021 as allegations involving three female attorneys came to light.

(Henderson was also the judge in the Daniel Holtzclaw case; Holtzclaw was accused of the same sort of abuse of power for sexual favors that drove Henderson from office. In 2019, all five judges in the Court of Criminal Appeals concurred in upholding Holtzclaw's conviction; of those five, Lewis, Musseman, and Lumpkin are still on the court, Kuehn is now on the Supreme Court, and Hudson has retired.)

The Criminal Appeals Court agreed with Hesse and by a narrow 3-2 vote remanded the case for a new trial, but Judges David B. Lewis and Gary Lumpkin dissented. In his dissent, Lewis argued that the because the relationship had ended two years before the actual trial was held, "These facts do not establish an especially high degree of risk that the average trial judge in this situation is objectively likely to be biased in favor of the state and against the defendant."

In the tables below I list each judge on the ballot, their current party registration, age, and the governor who appointed them. I also list my recommendation where I have one. For the rest, I am still gathering information.

Oklahoma Supreme Court

Court of Criminal Appeals

Court of Civil Appeals

*NOTE: Judges Rowland and Bell no longer appear to be in the public voter database, presumably having sought protection under one of the Voter Privacy Programs. In the most records available to me, from 2022, both were registered Republican at that time. (UPDATE 2024/10/23: I have been able to confirm that all of the judges in the Courts of Civil Appeals and Criminal Appeals are registered to vote as Republicans.)

A couple of friends have posted links to an article alleging shenanigans in Oklahoma's voter registration records. The article is on a website known for sensationalistic headlines, but that article linked to an analysis on another site more temperate in tone, but missing important context.

The bottom line: The voter ID number patterns which the analyst found suspicious in the short time he spent with the database have explanations rooted in the history of Oklahoma's voter registration system, specifically the transition to our first statewide registration computer system in 1990 and its replacement with a newer system in 2011.

The headline on The Gateway Pundit screams "Jerome Corsi: Oklahoma Added to the List of States with Irregularities in Board of Election Voter Registration Databases Suspected of Fraud." Corsi gets off to a misleading start:

In a highly suspicious August 27 run-off mayoral election in Tulsa, two relatively inexperienced political operatives with pedigree-quality, radically woke Democratic Party credentials beat a conservative Republican CPA, attorney, businessman, and pastor with a long history of community service, in Oklahoma, by the narrowest possible margins.

It wasn't a run-off -- it was the general election, with a run-off to come in November. Karen Keith, a 16-year county commissioner and 30+ year TV news reporter and anchor endorsed by the police and firefighter unions, and Monroe Nichols, an 8-year state representative endorsed by a former mayor, two former governors, and the daily paper, are hardly inexperienced. Brent VanNorman's long history of community involvement happened in other cities and states. Corsi doesn't appear to know that this election is officially non-partisan, with no party labels on the ballot. VanNorman was one of three registered Republicans running for mayor, but the only information about the party affiliations of the candidates was on websites like this one, not on the ballot. (I wonder who fed Corsi the above characterization of the Tulsa election.)

More about the dynamics of the mayoral race below. It was impressive that VanNorman did as well as he did with so little money, no name recognition, and a standing start with only three months to introduce himself to the voters. I'm not shocked that he failed to make the runoff; I'm amazed he came so close to making the runoff and beating the one-time front-runner, and I'm frustrated with the Republicans who withheld support entirely or until it was too late to matter (Tulsa County GOP, Kevin Stitt).

Corsi quoted a New York State-based analyst named Andrew Paquette, who has been acquiring voter databases from election boards and analyzing them, focusing on patterns in voter identification numbers as a potential indicator of fraud. Corsi goes on:

Paquette has charged that State Board of Elections official voter registration databases may contain cryptographic codes of intelligence agency complexity that enable rogue actors to obtain official state voter ID numbers for non-existent fraudulently created voters in an apparently criminal scheme designed to facilitate the certification of fraudulent mail-in votes.

(I have detected irregularities in Corsi's spelling of Paquette, which he spells "Pacquette" about as often as he spells it correctly.)

The article embeds Paquette's report but doesn't link to it, which is rather dodgy. Here is Paquette's report. Paquette's report is provided on his site as non-OCRed images, which is also rather strange. Here is the beginning of his Oklahoma analysis, which is much more circumspect than Corsi's lurid prose:

I have spent literally one day looking at Oklahoma's voter rolls. Much less if you subtract the time it took to import each county's database into a master database for study. In comparison, it took weeks before the first hints of voter roll algorithms were found in Ohio and New Jersey, and even longer in New York. With the caveat that this is not enough time to yield a definitive response either way, here are a few preliminary observations:

In this entry I'm going to focus on Paquette's suspicions about Oklahoma voter ID numbers and registration dates. He created scatterplots of date of registration on the X axis and was surprised to see that the voter ID numbers don't correlate in any obvious way to registration dates before 1990:

What this plot tells us is that ID numbers generally ascend as registration dates become more recent. There is a large break in CID numbers between about 720,000,000 through 800,000,000 that occurs in 2012. This break is found in all other OK counties. The reason for this is unclear, particularly for a state with a population size that is unlikely to ever exceed the available unused numbers. A close-up of numbers on the left of the plot reveals another break in the numbers in the year 1990, after which they ascend normally. Earlier numbers do not follow a normal ascending pattern, but are found in any year from 1950-1990, regardless of number size. That is, a high number from the series is just as likely to be from 1950 as 1990, but later numbers always ascend with the year. This is different from some counties and bears further investigation (Figure 2).

Had Paquette had more time with Oklahoma's numbers (why the big hurry?) he might have noticed that a large share of voter IDs from a given county begin with the same two digits and those two digits match the sequence of the county name in alphabetical order. Adair is 01, Woodward is 77. Tulsa and Wagoner are 72 and 73, respectively. Osage is 57 and Rogers is 66. Historically, back in the days of handwritten indexes, people sorted names beginning with Mc before all other names beginning with M, because a Mc name (a Celtic patronymic) is sometimes spelled as Mac, so McClain, McCurtain, and McIntosh are 44, 45, and 46, and Major is 47. Precinct numbers are six digits beginning with the two-digit county code. (FIPS county codes follow the same order, but are all odd numbers separated by two, which I suppose allows for a new county to be added in alphabetical order without renumbering the rest.)

So a large share of Tulsa County voter IDs, 155,841 out of 390,753 in the August 8, 2024, download, begin with 72. These were all issued on or before April 18, 2011. The rest of the voter IDs begin with 80, reflecting a move to a new statewide election computer system in 2011. Existing voters kept their ID numbers beginning with a county code, but new voters were registered with numbers beginning with 80, a value that would not conflict with any existing voter ID numbers, because Oklahoma has only 77 counties.

(Here is a January 2011 story announcing selection of a vendor for the new system, an op-ed by Oklahoma State Election Board Paul Ziriax, announcing the new system from Hart InterCivic, which included new ballot scanning machines to replace those that were nearly twenty years old, a July 2011 story mentioning the model names of the old (OPTECH III-P Eagle) and new scanners (Hart InterCivic eScan A/T Paper Based Digital Ballot Scanner), December 2011 article showing the difference in ballot styles between old and new machines.)

So why do voter ID numbers after 1990 increase monotonically with registration date, but are seemingly random until 1990? Because the Oklahoma State Election Board got its first statewide computer system that year. In Tulsa County there is a break in registrations between June 15, 1990, and June 30, 1990. If you sort the Tulsa County voter file by voter ID number and filter for registrations prior to June 15, 1990, you'll find that the names are mostly in alphabetical order. The exceptions to alphabetical order are mainly women; women are more likely to change their last name after they get married, but they keep their voter ID number. For example, near the end of those pre-1990 records, I found someone I know with the last name Werner whose voter ID number falls in sequence with people named Zumwalt, which was her married name in June 1990.

My wife and I are four numbers apart, even though I registered to vote in 1981 after I turned 18, and she registered to vote in Oklahoma eight years later, after we were married in 1989. Even though our first names are close together in alphabetical order, there were once six Michael Bateses registered to vote in Tulsa County, four with different middle names, and one with the same middle name and a date of birth six months earlier in the same year. There's still one other Michael Bates -- Michael S. Bates, the retired City of Tulsa human resources director, who was also registered to vote before the 1990 computer system went online -- his voter ID is after mine and before my wife's.

What is likely is that Tulsa County Election Board took its existing alphabetized voter database and entered them into the new system in that order, from A'Neal to Zyskowski. In the current database, those numbers range from 720000002 to 720300782, and the registration dates range from June 23, 1942, to June 15, 1990. I found only three exceptions in Tulsa County, three voters with ID numbers in that range who registered in October 1990, February 1991, and October 1996. Tulsa County's population in the 1990 census was 505,289; 59.5% seems a reasonable ratio of registered voters to population. Today there are 390,753 voters, and the 2020 population was 670,653 -- 58.3%.

There are only 51,323 voter records in that range of voter ID numbers today. A lot of people die or move away in 34 years. Whoever had 720000001 must fall in one of those categories. In 2016, 77,007 voters had ID numbers in that range.

(Here is an August 1990 Associated Press story about the state's then-new election administration computer system, running on Digital Equipment Corporation computers with software by Andersen Consulting, a branch of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, a May 1990 Okmulgee Daily Times story about election board worker training and reporting that the new system will go into use on July 1, and a July 1990 Oklahoma Press Association story on the new system.)

There are 226 records in the Tulsa County database with no recorded registration date. 189 of these have their addresses redacted with asterisks; among this group I recognize the names of district judges, assistant district attorneys, and others who might be at risk from stalkers. I'm not sure how blanking registration dates helps with security for these people, but there is a correlation. The law authorizing address confidentiality is here; the rules adopted by the State Election Board are here. (30 with redacted addresses have valid registration dates in 2023 or 2024, perhaps reflecting a later tweak to the law or election board procedure.)

Of the remaining 37 with no registration date, they were all born in 1962 or earlier, and all but one are in that initial group of voters entered into the computerized system in 1990. The date may not have been entered on the original record, or perhaps was illegible when the records were entered in 1990.

There are 9 records in the Tulsa County database where the registration date is earlier than the birth date. All 9 are part of the records that were input into the system in 1990. It's reasonable to guess that these were data entry errors when transcribing from cards to computer.

So, excluding the 219 redacted records, that's 46 voters out of 390,534 with blank or impossible voter registration dates, only 12 thousandths of one percent -- 0.012%. Ideally there wouldn't be any, but the county election board would have been wrong, as they entered the existing registration rolls into the computer system in 1990, to drop a duly registered voter for lack of a legible voter registration date.

Not all counties tracked voter registration dates prior to the 1990 computer system. The Osage County roll has only 48 voters with registration dates on or before June 15, 1990. 3,168 registration dates are blank out of 29,442. Wagoner County has only 44 voters with registration dates that pre-date the 1990 computer system, and 3,802 blank registration dates out of 51,987. But Rogers County apparently tracked registration dates before the 1990 computer system: It has only 805 blank registration dates out of 64,776 voter records; 23 of that 805 belong to voters with redacted addresses.

In summary, there's nothing weird about Oklahoma voter ID numbers or registration dates that isn't explained by the history of Oklahoma's computerized election management system. There are a small number of oddities that reflect a reasonable number of clerical errors.

Another concern raised by Paquette is that purged records are not retained in the database. The definition of a purged record is that it has been removed from the database. The State Election Board does, however, provide a separate file containing all records deleted statewide in the last 24 months. I am surprised that Paquette overlooked this data source. The file I downloaded on September 30, 2024, contains 244,388 records, of which 90,381 were removed as a county transfer (removed from the database of the voter's former county), 83,701 were deleted for inactivity, 51,647 as deaths (health department, next of kin, nursing/funeral home, written notice), 7,965 were deleted as duplicates, 3,128 for felony convictions, 2,572 are labeled CONF. NOTICE - STATE or CONF. NOTICE - COUNTY (possibly indicating that a confirmation postcard to the address on record was returned with a change of address out of county or out of state), 2,518 as a state transfer, 2,254 license surrender, 222 mental incapacity. The file includes the date of deletion, ranging from October 3, 2022, to September 29, 2024.

Paquette also complains about possible clones -- records with the same date of birth and first and last name. I haven't checked this yet; that would require looking at the entire state at once, and that involves loading all 77 separate county files into one database. I'll take a look at that at a later date.

On the jump page, I've got more detail regarding the dynamics of Tulsa's mayoral race and why Jerome Corsi's description doesn't fit the facts, on the contents of Oklahoma's voter registration database, and on why I don't trust any headline on The Gateway Pundit.

Some encouraging results in Tuesday's Republican runoffs; a heartbreaking near-miss in the Tulsa general election.

Grassroots candidates defeated three RINO incumbent legislators:

In Senate District 3, Julie McIntosh defeated incumbent Blake Cowboy Stephens by 61% to 39%. Corey DeAngelis, a leader in the national school choice movement celebrated the result, noting that Stephens was proud of being the teachers' union's Legislator of the Week.

In House District 32, Kevin Wallace, chairman of the House Appropriations and Budget Committee (a role that is a magnet for lobbyist money -- Wallace had almost three-quarters of a million dollars to spend) was defeated by Jim Shaw, 54% to 46%. Wallace's voting record received a failing grade from multiple conservative organizations. Wallace also lost support for his use of human manure ("biosolids") as fertilizer on his farmland and over concerns about wind and solar arrays displacing privately-owned farms and ranches in rural Oklahoma.

Gabe Woolley defeated House District 98 incumbent Dean Davis, whose arrest for public drunkenness made national news last year and had received a deferred sentence in 2019 after pleading nolo contendere to charges of a 2nd Offense DUI, speeding, and obstructing an officer.

Grassroots conservatives also fared well in open-seat runoffs. Lisa Standridge, wife of term-limited conservative stalwart Rob Standridge, has won her runoff in Senate District 15 by 51 votes of about 5,000 cast. Stacy Jo Adams in House 50 and Kelly Hines in Senate 47 each beat a better financed opponent 60% to 40%.

The closest race of the night was the two-vote victory of Jonathan Wilk over Mike Whaley in House 20, 1,668 to 1,666.

One of CAMP's few wins this season was in the Tulsa County Commission District 2 Republican runoff, with former State Rep. Lonnie Sims defeating Melissa Myers. Sadly, Josh Turley, running this year as an independent, has chosen to withdraw from the race. The general election will be between Sims and leftist activist Sarah Gray, who defeated former City Councilor Maria Barnes for the Democrat nomination.

City of Tulsa results were heartbreaking. Brent VanNorman, the only Republican with a significant campaign, finished just shy of making the runoff. Our choices in November (barring a change due to the recount that VanNorman has requested) will be Left and Lefter -- Democrat Karen Keith and Democrat Monroe Nichols.

The difference between 2nd & 3rd place was 438 votes, about 2.7 votes for each of Tulsa's 163 precincts. You can't help but wonder what would have happened if VanNorman had switched to the mayoral race a few weeks earlier, or if prominent Republicans like Gov. Kevin Stitt had endorsed early enough for TV ads and mail pieces. The key obstacle VanNorman faced was communicating to Republican voters that he was the candidate Republicans should support. That message had to be strong enough to stick with voters all the way into the voting booth, since the ballots carry no party labels.

Stitt's election eve endorsement came too late to communicate to the voters except by stickers on campaign signs election morning. I noticed that somehow, in their joint appearance at the Women for Tulsa meeting, no one managed to get a picture of Stitt and VanNorman together -- just an oversight, or purposeful on Stitt's part? Did the Governor want credit with the base for the last minute endorsement while not upsetting the people who really matter to him by making the endorsement so late and quiet as to make no difference? Stitt managed to find time to knock doors for Kevin "Humanure" Wallace and record a video attacking the supporters of Jim Shaw as "political animals." What if he had invested as much into helping a conservative Republican get elected as mayor of Oklahoma's second largest city?

And what if a long-time Tulsa Republican with a track record had run? State Sen. and former TU football coach Dave Rader, former AG Scott Pruitt, former AG John O'Connor, former Congressmen John Sullivan and Jim Bridenstine, former DA Tim Harris are just a few names that come to mind.

Keith's survival is thanks to early mail-in absentee ballots, presumably cast before her campaign began to sink. 53.4% of mail-in ballots were for Keith, 1,638 of 3,066 cast, giving her a 1,067 vote lead over Brent VanNorman. Keith and her CAMPaign team squandered a strong lead and positive name recognition. Many people had expected Keith to win without a runoff.

Election day ballots alone had Nichols at 33.2% (17,033), VanNorman at 33.0% (16,964), and Keith at 31.3% (16,082). Monroe Nichols won early voting at the Tulsa County Election Board, 975 to 801 for Keith and 492 for VanNorman.

VanNorman finished first in Districts 2 (43.4%), 6 (41.5%), 7 (40.8%), and 8 (47.5%), but turnout in 2 and 6 was particularly bad. Keith led only in District 9 (34.7%), but that had the highest turnout of any district. Although the districts were drawn to have nearly equal population, District 9 was 18.7% of the election day turnout. Districts 4, 8, and 9 combined for 54.0% of election day votes. Nichols dominated District 1 (66.4%) and District 4 (45.3%), and he finished slightly ahead in low-turnout District 3 (33.1% to 33.0% for Keith and 30.5% for VanNorman) and District 5 (34.5% Nichols, 31.4% VanNorman, 31.1% Keith).

The only bright spot in the city elections was the District 7 Council race, where Republican Eddie Huff made it to a November runoff against incumbent Democrat Lori Decter Wright, 43.7% to 48.6%. Decter Wright had only a 50-vote margin on election day, but she had a 204-vote lead from mail-in and early votes. This is a winnable race for Huff in November, but he will need volunteers and funds to reach Republican voters in the midst of a noisy general election season.

There will also be runoffs in Districts 2 and 9, and in both cases one candidate is above 40% with 2nd place trailing far behind. In District 2, Anthony Archie will face Stephanie Reisdorph, and in District 9, former State Rep. Carol Bush will face incumbent Jayme Fowler. Fowler spent several months running for mayor before deciding his run wasn't viable. He decided to file for re-election instead, although the other candidates had been campaigning under the assumption that this would be an open seat.

In District 2, as in the mayor's race, instant runoff voting might have produced a different top 2, as minor candidates would have been eliminated and had their votes redistributed to each voter's second choice.

On Tuesday, August 27, 2024, Oklahoma Republicans and Democrats have a partisan primary runoff election in a number of legislative and county races, and the City of Tulsa will conduct a non-partisan citywide general election, including races for Mayor, all nine City Council seats, as well as two charter-change propositions. There are a smattering of other school, municipal, and county propositions across Oklahoma. Here is the Oklahoma State Election Board's list of all races and propositions on the August 27, 2024, ballot.

In-person absentee voting will be available on Thursday, August 22, 2024, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., on Friday, August 23, 2024, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and (in most counties) on Saturday, August 24, 2024, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. For most counties, in-person absentee voting takes place at the county election board, but there are a few exceptions; click here for the full list of early-voting locations. Wagoner County will have a locations at NSU-BA and First Baptist Church in Wagoner. Polls will be open Tuesday, August 27, 2024, from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

NOTE: Precinct boundaries, voting locations, and district boundaries were changed, in some cases dramatically, in 2022. Enter your name and date of birth on the Oklahoma State Election Board's online voter portal and you will see where to vote and your sample ballot.

In response to popular demand, I have assembled the guidance detailed below into a downloadable, printable, single-page PDF.

Here are the candidates I'm recommending and (if in the district) voting for in the Oklahoma Republican runoff election and City of Tulsa general election on August 27, 2024. (This entry may change as I decide to add more detail, link previous articles, or discuss additional races between now and election day. The entry is post-dated to keep it at the top.)

Many readers have asked for a summary of my recommendations. My most enthusiastic choices are in bold. The hyperlink on the name of the office will take you to the article where I discuss that race.

Republican primary runoff:

The State Senate 33 runoff was a hard call: While I would be happy with either candidate (and have concerns about each), Christi Gillespie has earned the support of courageous conservative stalwarts like Sen. Dana Prieto, outgoing Sen. Nathan Dahm, and Tulsa school board member E'Lena Ashley, and I believe her experience as a member of the Broken Arrow City Council will help her be effective in navigating the legislative process. Shelley Gwartney was endorsed by primary opponent, Bill Bickerstaff, someone I greatly respect. That said, if I were Gillespie I wouldn't brag about Tulsa Regional Chamber and Oklahoma State Chamber endorsements, but I suspect they jumped aboard the bandwagon in light of her primary finish above 40%. (Please read my 2016 article "Chambers of Horrors" to understand why social and fiscal conservatives, opponents of cronyism, and supporters of historic preservation should find Chamber endorsements problematic.)

• Tulsa County Commissioner District 2: Melissa Myers
• State Senate 3: Julie McIntosh
• State Senate 15: Lisa Standridge
• State Senate 33: Christi Gillespie
• State Senate 47: Kelly Hines
• State House 20: Jonathan Wilk
• State House 32: Jim Shaw
• State House 50: Stacy Jo Adams
• State House 53: Nick Pokorny
• State House 60: Ron Lynch
• State House 98: Gabe Woolley

City of Tulsa general election:

For City of Tulsa races, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, there will be a runoff coincident with the state/federal general election in November. All of the candidates listed are registered Republican voters, except Angela Chambers (a Democrat running against a Democrat incumbent) and Aaron Griffith (an independent running against a Democrat incumbent).

Tulsa Mayor: Brent VanNorman

Tulsa City Council:

• District 1: Angela Chambers
• District 2: Aaron Bisogno
• District 3: Susan Frederick
• District 4: Aaron Griffith
• District 5: Karen Gilbert (very reluctantly)
• District 6: Christian Bengel (unenthusiastically)
• District 7: Eddie Huff
• District 8: Chris Cone
• District 9: Jayme Fowler

Tulsa charter amendments:

• Proposition 1: YES
• Proposition 2: YES

MORE INFORMATION:

OFFICIAL INFORMATION:

• Oklahoma State Election Board
• Tulsa County Election Board
• Oklahoma Ethics Commission Guardian campaign finance database

OTHER CONSERVATIVE VOICES:

Here are some blogs, endorsement lists, candidate questionnaires, and sources of information for your consideration.

• Muskogee Politico news and analysis
• Oklahoma Constitution Index: Scores incumbent legislators on voting record
• iVoterGuide surveys of Oklahoma statewide, federal, and legislative candidates
• City Elders Tulsa speakers' videos, including candidate speeches
• Oklahomans for Life candidate surveys
• Oklahomans for the 2nd Amendment (OK2A) endorsements
• NRA-PVF endorsements (NOTE: NRA typically endorses an incumbent over a challenger, even if both have similar views
• Oklahomans for Health and Parental Rights (OKHPR) endorsements

If you appreciate the many hours of research that went into this guide and into the rest of my election coverage, and if you'd like to help keep this site online, you can contribute to BatesLine's upkeep via PayPal. In addition to keeping me caffeinated, donated funds pay for web hosting, subscriptions, and paid databases I use for research. Many thanks to those generous readers who have already contributed.

UPDATE 2024/08/26 Election Eve: Governor Kevin Stitt appeared tonight with Brent VanNorman at a Women for Tulsa meeting and endorsed VanNorman for Mayor.

The Republican Party of Tulsa County has officially endorsed Brent VanNorman for Mayor of Tulsa in the Tuesday, August 27, 2024, election. So have a number of Republican elected officials and leaders, but other prominent Republican voices have remained silent.

On Wednesday, August 21, the Tulsa County GOP issued the following statement

Mayoral Endorsement Brent VanNorman

The municipal elections in Tulsa are fast approaching, with less than a week remaining. Many inquiries have been made about the Republican candidates in the mayoral race and the preferred candidate of the Tulsa County Republican Party.

In recent months, Brent VanNorman has demonstrated remarkable commitment and effort in his campaign to become Tulsa's next mayor. He has been working relentlessly to increase his visibility and share his vision for the city, achieving considerable success in his endeavors.

After discussions with the other active Republican candidate, we have concluded that uniting behind a single candidate will maximize our chances of success in the Tulsa mayoral race on August 27th. With his encouragement, we are pleased to direct our support to Brent VanNorman.

The Republican Party of Tulsa County urges our fellow Republicans to cast their vote for Brent VanNorman for Tulsa Mayor on August 27th.

Of the three Republican campaigns, only Brent VanNorman and Casey Bradford filed a Statement of Organization with the City Clerk's office, as required by law for raising and spending more than $1,000, but only VanNorman has filed the required campaign contribution and expenditure reports, which show him receiving maximum contributions on a nearly daily basis.

On Friday, voters received a mailer from the Brent VanNorman campaign listing endorsements from:

• Congressman Kevin Hern
• Former Attorney General John O'Connor
• Former Tulsa Police Chief Dave Been
• State Senator Dana Prieto
• State Representative Mark Tedford
• State Representative Chris Banning
• State Representative-elect Rob Hall
• Bama chairman/CEO Paula Marshall

The mailer quotes Congressman Hern: "Brent's commitment to Tulsa values and his real-world experience are unmatched. He will bring the fresh, new leadership Tulsa needs." Former AG John O'Connor writes: "Brent is a true family man and business leader. He's the only Republican running with a bold plan to put Tulsans first and ensure a bright future. "

But many prominent Republican officials with Tulsa ties are still silent and on the sidelines. Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell, Insurance Commissioner Glen Mulready, State Senator (and beloved former TU football coach) Dave Rader, Sheriff Vic Regalado, County Clerk Michael Willis, and County Court Clerk Don Newberry all reside in the City of Tulsa. (Gov. Kevin Stitt is registered to vote at the Governor's Mansion in Oklahoma City, but before he was elected, he lived in the Tulsa city limits.)

Why are these Republicans remaining on the sidelines? Some of them have a history of backing one Republican against others in past City of Tulsa elections. This time, they aren't backing someone other than VanNorman; they're just staying very quiet.

The number one reason is likely that VanNorman is so new to Tulsa. While we've had a relatively new Tulsan serve as mayor (Dick Crawford moved to Tulsa in 1978 and was elected mayor in 1986), it's an unusual circumstance. VanNorman's late entry into the mayor's race, switching just before filing from running for Council District 2, as Jayme Fowler dropped back to running for his old council seat, may be another eyebrow-raiser, although that looks like a pragmatic reaction to Fowler's failure to catch fire as a mayoral candidate and VanNorman's resources for a citywide campaign. Only recently has VanNorman campaign material reached mailboxes, radio, TV, and social media, so these GOP leaders may have been wondering if VanNorman's campaign was in earnest.

Elected officials are naturally focused on the preservation and extension of their own political careers, and an endorsement poses a risk to their own reputations. Some may be hoping that the problem will resolve itself after Tuesday -- either VanNorman is the lone Republican against a Democrat, making an endorsement in the November runoff straightforward, or else he's out and Tulsa voters choose between two Democrats in November.

I have to wonder, too, if some officials are deterred by their working relationships with either Democrat Karen Keith or her campaign consultants, who often represent Republicans.

While staying on the sidelines is understandable, these officials ought to expect a share of the blame from Republican voters in future elections if VanNorman fails to make the runoff by a slim margin while they remained silent.

I would think Gov. Stitt in particular would be glad to have the mayor of Oklahoma's second largest city on the same side of his fight for one system of laws and justice for all Oklahomans.

The latest poll released by VanNorman's campaign has the race tightening, with Karen Keith dropping to 25%, VanNorman rising to 23%, and Monroe Nichols slipping to 19%. Unsure is at 30% and other candidates are at 3% combined. But the margin of error is 7%, with only 227 responses, due to what the poll press release calls "response fatigue due to overpolling by many political races." The poll seems to indicate positive momentum for VanNorman, but at that MOE, any two of the three candidates could end up in the November runoff. The Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort will decide whether the November runoff includes a conservative Republican or is a choice between two left-of-center Democrats.

The key will be getting Republican voters to (1) turn up at the polls with an awareness that (2) VanNorman is the only conservative Republican running a well-funded campaign and (3) Karen Keith and Monroe Nichols a liberal Democrat. News coverage of trusted Republican voices endorsing VanNorman and robocall reminders from these officials to drive election-day turnout could have an impact. Even shifting a few hundred votes could be enough to make the difference in such a close race.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

Tulsa voters will see two proposed amendments to the City Charter on the August 27, 2024, city general election ballot. Both are worth approving.

Proposition 1 amends Article II, Section 2, to change a city councilor's salary from a fixed $24,000 per year to $32,000 per year, with biennial adjustments up or down based on cost-of-living. Here is the current text:

Each member of the Council shall receive a salary of twenty-four thousand dollars ($24,000.00) per year, commencing December 1, 2014, payable as employees of the city are paid. The City Council shall have no power to change its salary by its own vote. Councilors may be reimbursed for expenses incurred in the performance of their duties.

Here is the proposed replacement text, with new text underlined:

Each member of the Council shall receive a salary of thirty-two thousand dollars ($32,000.00) per year, commencing December 2, 2024, payable as employees of the City are paid. Thereafter any adjustment to City Council members' annual salaries shall be as certified by the City Treasurer to the City Council. Any adjustment, up or down, certified by the City Treasurer shall coincide with the start of a new City Council term. The salary certified by the City Treasurer shall be commensurate with the most local consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) published by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the immediately preceding two-year period. The City Council shall have no power to change its salary by its own vote. Councilors may be reimbursed for expenses incurred in the performance of their duties.

The original councilor's salary in the 1989 charter was $12,000. Although the Council had the power to vote for a salary increase to take effect after the next election, this was only done once, in 2002, increasing the salary to $18,000. In 2013, voters approved the current charter language, increasing the salary to $24,000 but removing the Council's power to adjust its salary.

While I like the idea of indexing the salary to inflation, and the method prescribed seems reasonable, I have a couple of concerns. City Treasurer is an office defined by the City Charter, but the method of appointment is not explicitly stated. If the City Treasurer is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the Mayor, there's a separation-of-powers problem. It could be a means for the Mayor to punish a Council he doesn't like.

The definition of the price index in the "escalator clause" also requires some interpretation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly CPI-U release includes "Table 4: Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U): Selected areas, all items index." CPI-U is calculated monthly for the four standard statistical regions and nine statistical areas and the three largest metropolises (NYC, LA, Chicago), then every two months for 20 large and notably expensive metropolitan areas, like Boston, Atlanta, Washington, and Urban Hawaii. The number that appears to meet the definition of "most local consumer price index" is the West South Central CPI-U, which increased by 2.5% between July 2023 and July 2024. A note on the spreadsheet cautions against relying on local area numbers (emphasis added):

NOTE: Local area indexes are byproducts of the national CPI program. Each local index has a smaller sample size than the national index and is, therefore, subject to substantially more sampling and other measurement error. As a result, local area indexes show greater volatility than the national index, although their long-term trends are similar. Therefore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics strongly urges users to consider adopting the national average CPI for use in their escalator clauses.

Proposition No. 2 would increase the ratio used to calculate the City Auditor's salary from the Mayor's salary. The current language, in Article IV, Section 2:

The salary of the City Auditor shall be seventy percent (70%) of the salary of the Mayor payable as employees of the city are paid.

The proposed replacement would say:

The salary of the City Auditor shall be seventy-five percent (75%) of the salary of the Mayor, payable as employees of the City are paid.

Currently, the Mayor's salary is $105,000, so the Auditor's pay would increase from $73,500 to $78,750. These salaries haven't changed since 2002. Barely six figures is not the money you pay the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation. Mid-five figures is not what you pay the auditor of a billion-dollar corporation.

Of course, we've never had a CEO in the Mayor's office under the 1989 "strong mayor" charter. We've had schmoozers and ribbon cutters. The people with the necessary skills to keep city departments running get paid much more than the mayor. (Before 1989, city departments were under elected commissioners who also served as the city's legislative body.) Most "strong" mayors have hired a Chief Administrative Officer and/or Chief Operating Officer to coordinate the department heads and leave Hizzonner free to schmooze. Republican Brent VanNorman is the only mayoral candidate this year with the experience to enable him to act as city government's CEO.

In theory, keeping salaries low compared to private-sector salaries for similar levels of responsibility should filter out those who are just in politics for the money. In reality, to run for a full-time office and serve, you'd either have to be independently wealthy, retired, or young enough for the pay to be a step up. Of you could be well-connected enough that the Powers That Be give your spouse a well-paid, no-show job, with the promise of a cushy sinecure for yourself when your time in office is over. Professionals in mid-career without those connections would have to put their careers on hold and take a huge pay cut. Their families would endure a lifestyle cut along with the absence of a parent and the massive disruption to family life that holding office entails.

City Council is even worse. Done right, it's a full-time job with part-time pay. You can make that work as a retiree (e.g. Jim Mautino, Roscoe Turner), with a solo professional practice (e.g., attorneys John Eagleton and Rick Westcott, although serving on the Council would have cut into their availability for legal work), or perhaps as a business owner with employees who can manage the business while you go to council meetings (e.g. Bill Martinson, Chris Trail).

If you're a non-profit executive, being a councilor is just an extension of your day job, so there's no need to take paid time off to attend council meetings. You're not there to represent your constituents, you're there to do the bidding of the philanthropocrats who fund or employ you. Any salary for being a rubber-stamp at council meetings is just icing on a very rich cake.

I'll be voting yes on both propositions as a step in a better direction, but there are consequences to the small amounts we pay our city officials.

The only valuable member of the current Tulsa City Council, the only councilor who was more than a rubber stamp, decided at the last minute not to run for re-election. District 5's Grant Miller had planned to run for a second term, but Tulsa's establishment (what I've called the Cockroach Caucus) made it clear that they were determined to ruin his life unless he went away.

Miller had the temerity to think for himself. He wisely opposed the Improve Our Tulsa 3 package, which was rushed to the ballot two years early and included $75 million for some magical, undefined solution for homelessness.

When Miller caught the Mean Girls Clique -- Vanessa Hall Harper, Laura Bellis, Lori Decter Wright -- texting each other during a public meeting of the Council's Urban and Economic Development Committee, in violation of the Oklahoma Open Meetings Act, he exposed their catty messages through an Open Records request. They were privately discussing the agenda item and ridiculing Miller's ideas, rather than using facts and reason to debate Miller's ideas publicly.

The Mean Girls Clique got their revenge with the help of the Meanest Girl of All, Mayor G. T. Bynum IV. Councilor Miller had completed his law degree at the University of Tulsa, had passed his bar exam, and had applied for admission to the Oklahoma bar. Bynum, Hall Harper, Bellis, and Decter Wright communicated "concerns" about Miller to the Oklahoma Board of Bar Examiners, who denied him the right to practice law in Oklahoma. The Bynum Mean Girls Clique, with other accomplices, punished Miller for his politics by preventing him from earning a living in the profession for which he had been expensively educated.

(And that brings us back to this question: Why is conservative Oklahoma allowing a left-leaning, Commie-supporting private club to serve as gatekeeper to the legal profession and the judiciary in Oklahoma?)

On top of all that, just as Tulsans began to read about the clearly political reasons for Miller's exclusion from the bar, a bogus charge of domestic assault and battery, called in two days after the event from someone a thousand miles away from Tulsa, resulted in an arrest and headlines. Miller was quickly cleared, and he intended to continue his campaign for re-election, but his plans were changed by the realities of needing to care for two children, including a young son with autism, while, he told KRMG in May, his wife was hospitalized for alcohol-induced pancreatitis.

This is the System, the Cockroach Caucus, making an example of someone who dared to think critically and independently. No wonder it's hard to find good candidates to run for City Council.

A few months ago, I was at an event where several council candidates spoke. Julie Dunbar, running in District 9, spoke in a way that was touchingly naive about her hopes for serving on the council. This is paraphrasing from memory, but she was looking forward to exchanging and discussing different ideas for improving the city with her council colleagues. Ms. Dunbar is a social worker who specializes in "Relationship Issues, Trauma and PTSD, and Life Coaching," so you'd think she would be able to recognize organizations blighted by narcissism and toxicity. Her husband, Todd Huston, served a term as a city councilor, and the same forces that helped him win election in 2000 recruited an opponent to defeat him in 2002, because he didn't endorse the "It's Tulsa's Time" tax increase on the November 2000 ballot. You'd think Huston might have been able to communicate to his wife that the Tulsa establishment doesn't welcome a diversity of ideas.

A couple of years ago, Tina Nettles, a Tulsa friend who raises chickens in her backyard, discovered that the commission rewriting the animal welfare ordinance was completely uninterested in hearing from citizens who are knowledgeable on the subject.

If you're serving on the City Council or on a board or commission, you might think you're there to propose creative solutions to the problems on the agenda. In 1998, District 4 City Councilor Anna Falling believed she had found a less expensive way to meet the city's recycling goals. While her proposal may have met the requirements of the stated agenda of city leaders, it apparently didn't also meet the real, hidden agenda. And so the Mayor and a compliant news media set out to end her service on the City Council. We could go on to talk about what was done to Jim Mautino, Chris Medlock, and Roscoe Turner in the mid-2000s and the lawfare targeting councilors circa 2009.

What's the hidden agenda of the Powers That Be? It might include making sure that "our friends at this non-profit and our friends who own a heavy construction company and our friends the bond attorneys and bond bankers all get a piece of the pie while those guys over there who aren't beholden to us at all get nothing." A solution that doesn't involve massive spending is worse than no solution at all, from their perspective. An alternate, simpler, less expensive solution to the stated agenda might capture the imagination of the public and make the plan that satisfies the hidden agenda politically impossible.

In the immortal words of Sal Tessio:

Sally's stated agenda (protecting the boss in a meeting with his rival) didn't line up with his hidden agenda (setting up the boss to be assassinated). His angry reaction to the proposal of a different plan to meet the stated agenda exposed the treacherous hidden agenda. The future Fish was taken away to sleep with the fishes.

Which brings us to the August 27, 2024, City of Tulsa general election. For a start, we need to defeat these three harpies, the Mean Girls Clique, who carried out this attack on Miller on behalf of the Cockroach Caucus. We also recall Vanessa Hall Harper's racist verbal attack on Republican Sen. Tim Scott and Laura Bellis's obscenity-saturated speech at a fundraiser for Lori Decter Wright claiming Republican City Council candidates were "actual fascists," sentiments praised by Decter Wright.

Fortunately, each of those three districts has a better alternative on the ballot:

There are seven candidates on the August 27, 2024, ballot for Mayor of Tulsa. If one candidate manages more than 50% of the vote, he or she will be elected. If no candidate reaches that threshold, there will be a runoff on November 5, 2024, between the top candidates. From Article VI, Section 2.2 of the Tulsa City Charter: "If more than two (2) candidates file for an office and no candidate receives more than fifty percent (50%) of all votes cast at the election for that office, the names of the several candidates for the office receiving the greatest number of votes totaling fifty percent (50%) at such elections shall be placed on the ballot at a run-off election in November, on the day specified by the laws of Oklahoma, and the candidate receiving the greatest number of votes cast at said run-off election shall be deemed elected."

Because of the number of candidates, the non-partisan ballot (no party primary), and the possibility of an outright winner in August, conservatives need to vote tactically. If conservative votes are divided among the three Republicans on the ballot, the likely outcome will either be an outright victory for Karen Keith in August, or a runoff between two bad Democrat options, Karen Keith and Monroe Nichols, in November.

A poll conducted after the mayoral debate has Democrat Karen Keith leading with 33.4%, Democrat Monroe Nichols with 21.9%, conservative Republican Brent VanNorman with 19.2%, and the other four candidates at 1.9% combined. 23.6% are undecided. If Republicans can hold Keith below 50% and get VanNorman into second place, there's a good shot at electing a conservative mayor for the first time in 38 years.

Brent VanNorman would bring a variety of experience to the table -- president of an investment company, pastor, accountant, attorney. Until June he served as president of TriLinc Global, but he continues as the investment firm's General Counsel, according to his LinkedIn resume. Prior to that, he spent 13 years as an intellectual property attorney, engaging in patent litigation for Hunton & Williams LLP in Richmond, Virginia. He connected with Tulsa when his son came here in 2008 to attend Oral Roberts University; he and his wife moved here in 2021.

It would be a breath of fresh air to have a mayor who is an outsider to the local establishment. He wants to make Tulsa the "business-friendliest" city in America. He acknowledges the growth of crime and homelessness and has plans to address both. VanNorman has been endorsed by Congressman Kevin Hern, who writes, "Brent combines diverse expertise with strong business acumen. His commitment to common-sense family values and real-world experience make him the fresh, effective leader Tulsa needs." Tony Lauinger of Oklahomans for Life writes that VanNorman is "strongly pro-life."

During the KJRH-NonDoc debate at Cain's Ballroom, Karen Keith issued platitudes and spoke of relationships, Monroe Nichols advocated for destructive policies, but Brent VanNorman presented common-sense solutions in a positive way. In the debate's section on homelessness, VanNorman was the only candidate to identify drug abuse and mental illness as the heart of the crisis, something that can't be fixed by subsidizing developers to build more housing (Keith's solution). He mentioned God's Shining Light's holistic ministry to the homeless. The church has restored the Saratoga Motel, a Route 66 classic, as a 107-unit sober living center, offering "a safe residential housing environment, counseling, training, job opportunities, and education in a grace filled atmosphere."

VanNorman was the only candidate to oppose Tulsa's "Welcoming City" certification, a status that implicitly forbids the city from cooperating with federal authorities enforcing immigration law under programs like 287(g) cooperation agreements or taking measures to deter illegal immigrants from settling here. He correctly exposed the label one step toward a sanctuary city.

Regarding the other major candidates, VanNorman said that they "are both liberal Democrats. They're great people, they're wonderful to be around, they're well intended, but their policies will lead us to being the next Seattle, the next Portland, the next Minneapolis, the next San Francisco," referring to the squalor, crime, and civil disorder that has characterized the failed governance of leftist-controlled cities."

More on Keith and Nichols after the jump:

Co-governance is a means for bypassing democracy. On the pretext of righting historical wrongs, the self-styled leaders of indigenous groups, representing a tiny percentage of the overall population, are given not only a seat at the table, but also a deciding vote or veto over decisions made by the elected representatives of the entire population.

New Zealand is furthest along the path to co-governance, although the voters there pushed back last year. (Here's an explainer from a pro-co-governance perspective.) For example, the previous government, led by socialist Jacinda Ardern of the Labour Party, started a process to take governance of water supply away from local governments and giving it to regional bodies with equal representation of Maori tribal leaders and the general population, a plan called Three Waters. Self-identified Maori constitute about 20% of the national population. There once was a requirement to prove Maori ancestry and a blood quantum over 50% in order to vote in elections for set-aside Maori parliamentary and council seats, but people can now self-identify, which is likely swelling the numbers.

Co-governance is a great setup for the Left. If you can't get the support of the general public for your "progressive" plans, you can more easily manipulate tribal leaders who were voted in by tiny electorates. Under co-governance those tribal leaders would be able to stop a conservative city or state government initiative or push a left-wing proposal that a majority of the total electorate would have rejected. If a billionaire with an agenda can turn the heads of the elected officials of a city of 400,000 people, it would be no problem for him to enlist the compliance of leaders elected by 5,193 voters with some cash for pet projects and promises of cushy non-profit gigs.

Citizens of Australia and New Zealand wisely rejected pushes for co-governance last October with Aussies overwhelmingly defeating the "Indigenous Voice to Parliament" proposal and Kiwis electing a new center-right coalition opposed to the co-governance that had been pushed by the defeated socialist government. The new New Zealand government has repealed the Three Waters proposal. David Seymour, leader of ACT, a junior partner in the newly-elected coalition government, writing before the election, explained eloquently the divisiveness and injustice inherent in co-governance:

"The current [Labour] government is presenting New Zealanders with a false choice. It says that if we want to right the wrongs of the past, cherish Māori language and culture, and give all New Zealanders equal opportunity, then we must throw out universal human rights in favour of co-government.

"Parties on the left, led by Labour, promote decision-making made by two parties jointly co-governing when it comes to regulatory decisions and government service delivery. ACT would overturn and replace the obsession with co-government, replacing it with a more liberal outlook that treats all humans with equal dignity....

"We are told that 'one-person-one-vote' is old-fashioned, and we should welcome a new, 'enlightened' type of political system. This new system is a 'tiriti-centric Aotearoa,' where we are divided into tangata whenua, people of the land, and tangata tiriti, people of the treaty. Each person will not have an inherent set of political rights because they are citizens of New Zealand. Instead, they will have rights based on their whakapapa or ancestry.

"Continuing to embed the extraordinary belief will be highly divisive. The danger is that if the Government continually tells people to regard each other as members of a group rather than individuals with inherent dignity, there is a danger people will internalise that lesson. Once that happens, it is very difficult to go back."

The wrongly-decided McGirt ruling laid a legal foundation on which co-governance could be justified in Oklahoma. Yes, co-governance would be built atop the pain and trauma of a four-year old girl who was sexually molested by her grandmother's husband.

By the way, child molester Jimcy McGirt, cornerstone of co-governance, is now a free man. Despite claims at the time (e.g. T. W. Shannon) that McGirt would receive a harsher penalty in Federal court, his 500-year Oklahoma district court sentence was replaced with a 30-year Federal sentence and credit for time served. (Details on how that came about on the jump page.)

Although Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion, backed by the Court's left wing, stated that the scope of the ruling was limited to prosecution of felonies under the Major Crimes Act, the City of Tulsa's amicus brief and Chief Justice John Roberts's minority opinion spelled out the dangerous implications of the McGirt ruling, which overturned 100 years of settled law and precedent:

Across this vast area, the State's ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out. On top of that, the Court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma. The decision today creates significant uncertainty for the State's continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family and environmental law.

None of this is warranted. What has gone unquestioned for a century remains true today: A huge portion of Oklahoma is not a Creek Indian reservation. Congress disestablished any reservation in a series of statutes leading up to Oklahoma statehood at the turn of the 19th century. The Court reaches the opposite conclusion only by disregarding the "well settled" approach required by our precedents. Nebraska v. Parker, 577 U. S. 481, ___ (2016) (slip op., at 5).

With Justice Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a more recent ruling began to contain the toxic legal overflow of McGirt. The 2022 Castro-Huerta ruling, decided 5-4 with Gorsuch now in the minority, put crimes committed by non-Indians in eastern Oklahoma back under the jurisdiction of Oklahoma's district courts.

There is reason to hope that further rulings would continue to limit the bounds of McGirt and perhaps some day to reverse it altogether. Hooper v. Tulsa, a case questioning the City of Tulsa's ability to enforce its traffic laws, was working its way through the federal courts. The city sought a stay on the federal district judge's ruling, but a 3-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court and SCOTUS both denied a stay. The district judge dismissed the case in December. (I have reached out to experts to find out where this case stands and whether the city will further pursue the case.)

Those mitigating rulings will not happen if our elected officials choose to drop the cases. Oklahoma is already hampered by a state attorney general who seems more beholden to tribal governments than to the people of Oklahoma. It's in the interest of tribal officials (and the forces who hope to harness them for their own ends) to get city and state elected officials to halt legal challenges to tribal jurisdiction and agree to co-governance, creating a fait accompli before the issue reaches SCOTUS.

You either have one territorial sovereign, elected by all the people and governing all the people, or you have something like South Africa's apartheid system, with different laws and courts for different people based on ancestry. It's to the benefit of all Tulsans, tribal citizens as well as the rest of us, to have a single system of laws and justice consistently applied to everyone, whether you have a great-great-great-great grandfather on the Dawes roll or not. We need our next mayor and council to pursue that goal aggressively through the federal courts.

The issue was raised at the recent Tulsa mayoral debate at Cain's Ballroom. Only one of the three major candidates, Republican Brent VanNorman, will defend the principle engraved on the pediment of the Supreme Court building: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

VanNorman would continue to pursue criminal jurisdiction over tribal members in the Federal courts. He had an apt illustration: "If someone's here from Kansas and is speeding, we expect our police to pull them over and give them a ticket." The law should be applied the same no matter what license plate you have. While VanNorman spoke about communication and coordination with tribal governments, which aren't prepared to handle the burden of law enforcement that sovereignty implies, VanNorman affirms that there must be one set of laws and one system of justice for everyone. Equal justice under law.

"Democrat" State Rep. Monroe Nichols is committed to co-governance with tribal officials. That means that officials elected by tiny numbers of voters, most of whom live outside the City of Tulsa, will decide how our city is run, not the elected representatives of the citizens of Tulsa.

Nichols's own webpage on the topic acknowledges that there are only 30,000 Native Americans living in Tulsa; undoubtedly fewer than that number are citizens of the tribes that claim to have reservations covering part of the city. Those 30,000 people are full citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the USA, and are already represented in city, state, and federal elections. It's not democratic to give them more say than the 370,000 Tulsans who are not tribal citizens. (Thus the sneer-quotes around "Democrat" above; the "Democrat" Party has shown on this issue and in the replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris that they don't respect democracy.)

Nichols stated at the debate that Tulsa is the largest city in the US in an Indian reservation. That's because for 113 years, it was NOT governed as if it were in an Indian reservation. (It wasn't in an Indian reservation, and it still isn't, except for the mineral rights of the Osage County portion.)

You can't build a city in a reservation. The Navajo reservation, the largest in the nation, is nearly the size of Oklahoma's pre-statehood Indian Territory (27,413 sq. mi. vs. 31,069.88 -- source here), but it has no cities. Land is held in common, controlled by the tribal government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, so it can't be developed. 40% of the population lives below the poverty line.

In Oklahoma, allotment gave tribal citizens land of their own to farm, develop, or sell, providing capital and clear title where cities and towns, businesses and industries could be established and grow. The Curtis Act and other laws of the period affirmed the USA's agreements with the the Five Tribes that their citizens, "when their tribal governments cease, shall become possessed of all the rights and privileges of citizens of the United States." Without the Curtis Act, allotment, and statehood, there would be no Tulsa, no McAlester, no Ardmore, no Ada. Tribal capitals like Tahlequah and Okmulgee would be villages, not the cities they became after they were platted and the lots transferred to tribal members.

In her answer (in most of her answers), Karen Keith talked about relationships. Keith said she has talked to "our Nations' leaders" about putting a "pan-tribal court" in a new Tulsa County Courthouse. She wants to come to "consensus" with tribal authorities in hopes of getting rid of the legal issues. In other words, she would capitulate to a dual system of justice but would hope to help citizens "navigate" the confusing system that Gorsuch, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan devised in McGirt.

I said before the midterm primaries that 2022 was the McGirt election, but every election will be a McGirt election until Congress explicitly reaffirms the disestablishment of reservations (already accomplished before statehood, but denied by Gorsuch et alii) or until the Supreme Court narrows or eliminates the scope of the ruling.

The McGirt case was wrongly decided, with the narrow 5-4 majority ignoring the legal developments that occurred in the decades leading to statehood. Subsequent rulings, after the replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett, have limited the scope of McGirt, and we can hope that the U. S. Supreme Court will ultimately limit McGirt's implications to the Major Crimes Act cited in that ruling, and perhaps overturn it altogether. To reach that democratic goal, our mayor needs to be a strong advocate for democracy and equal justice, not a a puppet of petty tribal fiefdoms. That's one more reason I will be voting for Brent VanNorman for mayor on August 27, 2024.

Click "Continue reading" for video of the debate section on co-governance and more on the legal process that led to McGirt's release from prison last month.

Democrat Karen Keith, Tulsa County Commissioner for District 2 since 2009, is the front-runner in the August 27, 2024, election for Mayor of Tulsa. She has a reputation for niceness built on her years in television news.

Josh Turley has run against Keith for the District 2 County Commission seat. He was running again this year as an independent but recently withdrew from the race for personal reasons. He lives in far-west, unincorporated Tulsa County, where the County Commissioner has responsibility for road maintenance.

Turley has posted a long list of Keith's failures and broken promises in her four terms as County Commissioner. Here are his "14 Reasons to NOT Vote for Karen Keith":

Take a stroll, if you dare, down Archer and Denver. Karen's throwing your tax dollars at the homeless won't fix it.

While you're at it, slip down Charles Page to the QT at Gilcrease. See those doors closed? That's because she dumped the homeless at the old juvenile center and now they plague the area!

Cruise on down Charles Page and see how she's completely decimated a road that once was the busiest road in Tulsa. No help, just more words, to those on the West Side.

Make sure to see the Gilcrease Extension, which is really a turnpike!

Make sure to see how the turnpike doesn't exit at Charles Page as initially promised.

Remember how she told you the Gilcrease Turnpike would bring in more business? Well that portion of town definitely isn't growing!

When ya get to 65th West, make sure to check out those levees she's told you were gonna be fixed - for her entire time as County Commissioner.

Remember how she refuses to investigate the asphalt plant at 81st West and the river?

Yes, the one that contaminates the locals with clouds of smoke and the children's school just north of the highway!

Take a cruise down Wekiwa. This road was only asphalted for the bike race held every few years. Who builds a road for bicycles and that doesn't have bike paths..that's right Karen does.

While you are out our way, be sure to take a drive across the Keystone dam. A dam that they plan to raise at least 12 feet with no plan to add additional height to the levees that are still in disrepair. Oh, ya didn't know about that did ya? She's told us there's money for them levees, but when? How much? When will it start? ..just more talk.

Then take a quick drive below the dam to Swift Park. Yes, that's called Old Hwy 51. She let the road dilapidate into giant potholes. Some are so large that the Sand Springs Fire Department ripped an entire wheel off their boat responding to a water rescue. Oh, and then she closed off the road forcing emergency crews and citizens (wanting to fish) to take the route you just traveled from Sand Springs.

Once you change your flat from Old Hwy 51, cruise on over to 265th, then to 41st west ave S. This road is a major thoroughfare for us out west. Be sure to put your teeth in the glove box, a new pillow under your seat, cuz you gonna need it all the way to Sand Springs.

Then drive on to Berryhill and see how she deliberately put a turnpike through one of the last great small communities.

Take a drive by Berryhill School on 65th west, and know they have been promised a sewer solution, and they still don't have one!

Take a quick jaunt over to 31st and go east, once you go under the turnpike take a look to the right...yes, that is HER Tulsa County Road Barn! It's a dump!

Guess what Tulsa, we are glad to get rid of her, but you have the option to fight her off.

Vote NO MORE KAREN!
VOTE August 27th!

A County Commissioner is the official responsible for maintaining roads and infrastructure in unincorporated areas of his or her district, and District 2 has significant unincorporated territory west of Sand Springs. Keith has also boasted of her role in getting the Gilcrease loop completed as a toll road through Berryhill.

MORE:

Gene Savage reminds us of Karen Keith's role, as a member of the Tulsa County Public Facilities Authority (Fair Board), in the demise of the Skyride at Expo Square:

Please, please, PLEASE don't vote for this woman August 27th! Karen Keith voted to tear down the Tulsa Skyride before it could be put on the National Register of Historic Places.

She ignored answers to the Fair Board's concerns about the Skyride's future. She ignored pleas from Tulsa citizens asking her to wait.

If she can't be bothered to care about something like the Tulsa Skyride, a historical ride unique in the United States that she was told could never be rebuilt if torn down, how can we trust her to take care of our city as mayor?

I don't believe we can. Her behavior suggests she will trash Tulsa history while taking money from foreign organizations.

Karen Keith has proven she is WRONG for Tulsa. Please vote anybody else August 27th.

During her first year in office, 2009, Karen Keith tried to bully Planning Commissioner Elizabeth Wright, the one homeowner-friendly member of the TMAPC, into resigning before the end of her term, bringing bogus accusations as grounds for removal. Wright's only "crime" was being a well-informed planning commissioner who asked developers insightful questions. At the NonDoc/KJRH mayoral debate, Keith boasted of working closely with her developer friends, a reminder that we can't trust Karen Keith to protect the character or historical integrity of Tulsa's neighborhoods.

I have seen some comments in social media and other voter guides about the Indian Nations Council of Government (INCOG), with the implication that anyone who has served on the INCOG board is a globalist and a minion of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF). But INCOG has been around for nearly 60 years, has no real power of its own, and its board members are mostly whoever happens to be mayor of the municipalities who are INCOG members.

Concentrated areas of population rarely stay within a given set of boundaries. Cities acquire suburbs -- either new settlements on the edge of the city or small towns suddenly in the path of growth and booming. A municipal corporation has well-defined boundaries on the map; the area where people work and live and go to church and socialize has a very fuzzy boundary that likely incorporates many municipalities, may bleed into several counties, and in some cases will extend over state lines. Infrastructure -- water supply, waste disposal, transportation -- is interconnected as well. While it's great for residents and business owners to be able to choose among a variety of cities and towns and unincorporated areas, each with its own laws, tax rates, and leadership, it's also valuable for those municipalities to collaborate and coordinate across the region.

Many urban regions have established bodies of interlocal cooperation and governance of varying degrees of formality and authority. In 1829, the Metropolitan Police was set up for the municipalities in the vicinity of the square-mile City of London. Later in the century, the Metropolitan Board of Works was established to deal with infrastructure across the region around London. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey manages New York Harbor.

The class of which INCOG is an instance is sometimes called a Council of Governments, a Substate Planning District, or Economic Development District. These started springing up in earnest in the late 1960s during the Lyndon Johnson administration, in fulfillment of requirements attached to federal grant programs. This article on Federalism.org details the federal program requirements that pushed the growth of COGs as gatekeepers to federal grants, the reversal of many of these requirements by President Ronald Reagan, what COGs did to stay alive, and the ongoing role they have in distribution of federal transportation funding, in their role as Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs).

Back in 2010, when there was some obfuscation about INCOG's interactions with the City of Tulsa, I wrote an explainer distinguishing between INCOG as the COG to which Tulsa belongs, as the MPO required for federal transportation grants, and as a contractor providing staffing and record-keeping for Tulsa's land-use process. Go read those articles first, and then let's zoom out and look at INCOG more broadly.

In 1965, Oklahoma passed the Interlocal Cooperation Act in response to regional planning requirements in the 1965 Federal Housing Act. There's a detailed explanation of how these entities came into existence in Oklahoma on the website of the Oklahoma Association of Regional Councils.

INCOG Is one of 11 that substate planning districts that cover the entire state:

• Association of Central Oklahoma Governments
• Association of South Central Oklahoma Governments
• Central Oklahoma Economic Development District
• Eastern Oklahoma Economic Development District
• Grand Gateway Economic Development Association
• Indian Nation Council of Governments
• Kiamichi Economic Development District of Oklahoma
• Northern Oklahoma Development Association
• Oklahoma Economic Development Association
• Southern Oklahoma Development Association
• Southwestern Oklahoma Development Authority

INCOG originally covered Tulsa, Creek, and Osage counties, the Tulsa Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area as defined by the Census Bureau between the 1960 and 1970 censuses. Today, INCOG is open to a broader membership. Five county governments (Tulsa, Creek, Osage, Wagoner, Rogers), 19 cities and towns, and three tribal governments (Osage, Muscogee Creek, Cherokee) are INCOG members, and another 32 cities and towns participate with INCOG in some way. Member governments have one seat on the general assembly, which meets once a year.

Oklahoma law explicitly does not require local governments to belong to a COG or to participate in a COG. But a COG may have to be involved in the pursuit of a federal grant.

The INCOG Board of Directors meets monthly. Each county has at least four seats on the board: The three County Commissioners and a member representing the county's small towns. Tulsa County has an additional six members. The City of Tulsa has 9 members, Broken Arrow has three, but the other member cities and towns have one. Usually the mayor of the municipality is the designated INCOG board member. Broken Arrow's three seats are filled by the mayor, vice mayor, and city manager. As BA vice mayor, Christi Gillespie serves on the INCOG board, as does Bixby mayor Brian Guthrie; Lonnie Sims was an INCOG board member when he was Mayor of Jenks.

You can find general assembly and board agendas on the INCOG website, but they are very terse. I wasn't able to find any meeting minutes online.

INCOG's list of services are a mix of functions relating to federal agencies and grants and services provided under contract to some member governments.

One area of particular concern is INCOG's involvement in regional lobbying. Twelve cities, Tulsa County, and INCOG are members of the Coalition of Tulsa Area Governments (CTAG), for which INCOG provides support staff. CTAG develops a slate of legislative issues each year and also signs up to the Tulsa Regional Chamber's One Voice lobbying agenda. It would be fair game to hold current or former CTAG and INCOG board members accountable for issues included on the CTAG and One Voice agendas.

Serving as an INCOG board member ex officio as the mayor of your town isn't suspicious in and of itself, but it's fair to look at the federal and non-profit grants that city governments are seeking and what strings are attached.

While I reserve the right to change my mind, here are the candidates I am currently inclined to support in the Tulsa general election and Oklahoma runoff election on August 27, 2024.

Between now and the election, I will be keeping an eye out on PAC donations and looking deeper into consulting companies. With so many establishment candidates having lost in the primaries, special-interest PAC money is going to be flowing somewhere, and we'll find out which candidates can resist their siren songs.

Political observers have a 40/5 rule of thumb: A candidate that gets over 40 percent in the primary and has at least a 5 point margin over the second-place candidate is almost certain to win the runoff. There have been exceptions, but it generally holds true. In Senate District 33 (Christi Gillespie 44%, Shelley Gwartney 25%), the first-place finisher could likely win just by turning out her voters in August, while the second-place finisher has to get her own people to the polls, plus those who supported the eliminated candidates, a big hill to climb. House District 32 (Jim Shaw 46%, Kevin Wallace 42%) could go either way by the 40/5 rule, but an incumbent who finishes second in a primary is unlikely to prevail in the runoff.

In Tulsa Council districts 5 and 6, there aren't any candidates I can get excited about, but differences over managing the police department and cooperation with ICE might tip the scales one way or another. In 2 and 9, there are multiple interesting possibilities. In 3, I don't know enough about the two candidates. (UPDATE 2024/07/25: I've added recommendations in Districts 2, 3, 5, 6, and 9. In 5 and 6, it came down to "better than the alternative." Where possible, I'd like to avoid having more councilors who have spent most of their career in the non-profit world.)

Only the Tulsa mayor's race and council districts 2, 7, and 9 will be on the August 27 ballot, because there are three or more candidates. The remaining council districts will be settled on November 5. CORRECTION: All of the council seats will be on the August 27 ballot, and any two-candidate race will be settled then. This is in contrast to school board seats, where the law was changed a few years ago so that a two-candidate race is settled on what used to be the school-board runoff date in April.

In District 4, I got to know Aaron Griffith many years ago in the Midtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations. He's to my left politically, but he has a thick skin and is willing to endure the slings and arrows to stand up for what he believes is right. Aaron is strongly pro-neighborhood, has been a vocal critic of administrative shenanigans at Tulsa Public Schools, and he supports enforcing our immigration laws.

In District 7, I know Eddie Huff through his years as a conservative radio talk host at KFAQ. Margie Alfonso has been an important contributor to conservative politics over the years, but Eddie is better suited to winning a November runoff and serving, but he'll need enough GOP turnout to force a November runoff.

Chris Cone spoke to a Republican group about his vision for the job and his concerns about District 8. He was very impressive, and it will be good to have someone on the Council who is not beholden to the big foundations, knows something of the real world, and does more than pay lip service to his Christian faith. In District 1, I have not met Angela Chambers in person yet, but I see her very positive posts about life and entrepreneurship, and she seems like she will be a great improvement over the incumbent.

Brent VanNorman switched from the Council District 9 race to the mayor's race, and he looks like the best chance to get a conservative in the mayor's office for the first time since Dick Crawford and Jim Inhofe almost 40 years ago. He has the resources to run a strong race, but he needs to draw enough GOP turnout in the August 27 election to force a November runoff.

Tulsa City Elections:

Mayor: Brent VanNorman
Council District 1: Angela K. Chambers
Council District 2: Aaron Bisogno
Council District 3: Susan Frederick
Council District 4: Aaron Griffith
Council District 5: Karen Gilbert (very reluctantly)
Council District 6: Christian Bengel (unenthusiastically)
Council District 7: Eddie Huff
Council District 8: Chris Cone
Council District 9: Jayme Fowler

Oklahoma runoff:

Senate 3: Julie McIntosh
Senate 15: Lisa Standridge
Senate 33: Undecided
Senate 47: Undecided

House 20: Jonathan Wilk
House 32: Jim Shaw
House 50: Stacy Jo Adams
House 53: Undecided
House 60: Ron Lynch
House 98: Gabe Woolley

Tulsa County Commissioner District 2:

Republican runoff: Melissa Myers
Democrat runoff: Maria Barnes

Polls will be open for in-person voting on Tuesday, June 18, 2024, from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

NOTE: Precinct boundaries, voting locations, and district boundaries have changed significantly since the 2020 elections. Enter your name and date of birth on the Oklahoma State Election Board's online voter portal and you will see where to vote and your sample ballot.

UPDATE: Don't miss my final thoughts on the 2024 Oklahoma Republican Primary.

In response to popular demand, I have assembled the guidance detailed below into a downloadable, printable, single-page PDF.

Here are the candidates I'm recommending and (if in the district) voting for in the Oklahoma Republican primary elections on June 18, 2024. (This entry will change as I decide to add more detail, link previous articles, or discuss additional races between now and election day. The entry is post-dated to keep it at the top.)

As I post this, I'm still unsure about several races, but time is short, people are soon to vote, and many have asked for a summary of my recommendations. My most enthusiastic choices are in bold; in other races, there may be one or two other candidates that would be acceptable, or I simply don't know the endorsed candidate as well as I would like. There are certain incumbents that I'd like to see defeated, but I don't feel comfortable endorsing an opponent at this point. I'll try to fill in TBDs and NOTs before the start of early voting.

One race in particular, SD 33, was a tough choice; I've endorsed each of the three candidates who have run in previous elections (Tim Brooks, Shelley Gwartney, Christi Gillespie), and I've known the fourth, Bill Bickerstaff, for many years and know him as a principled conservative who has been quick to volunteer for other candidates and who has been a key member of the Tulsa Beacon team. I watched the GOP forum, and I believe Brooks is best prepared to be an effective legislator who will follow in the footsteps of Nathan Dahm and Jason Murphey, who won't be lured into the capitol favor factory. But any of the four candidates should be very good legislators.

1st Congressional District: Kevin Hern.
2nd Congressional District: Josh Brecheen renominated without opposition.
3rd Congressional District: NOT Frank Lucas
4th Congressional District: NOT Tom Cole and NOT Paul Bondar
5th Congressional District: Stephanie Bice was renominated without opposition

Corporation Commissioner: Russell Ray

State Senate 1: Micheal Bergstrom
State Senate 17: Shane Jett
State Senate 25: Brian Guthrie
State Senate 29: Wendi Stearman
State Senate 33: Tim Brooks
State Senate 37: Cody Rogers

State House 2: Jim Olsen
State House 10: Chad McCarthy
State House 23: Derrick Hildebrant
State House 25: Robert Burch
State House 28: Danny Williams
State House 38: Marven Goodman
State House 41: Denise Crosswhite Hader
State House 67: Rob Hall
State House 68: Jonathan Grable
State House 79: Paul Hassink
State House 98: Gabe Woolley
State House 100: Marilyn Stark

Tulsa County Commissioner District 2: Melissa Myers

Tulsa County Court Clerk Don Newberry and Sheriff Vic Regalado have been re-elected without opposition. County Clerk Michael Willis was renominated without opposition but will face Democrat Don Nuam in the general election.

MORE INFORMATION:

CANDIDATE FORUMS:

The Republican Party of Tulsa County Facebook page has video of the candidate forums it sponsored:

• Tulsa County Commission District 2
• Senate District 25 (moderated by yours truly)
• Senate District 33
• Senate District 37
• House District 67
• House District 68
• House District 79

OTHER CONSERVATIVE VOICES:

Here are some blogs, endorsement lists, candidate questionnaires, and sources of information for your consideration.

• Muskogee Politico news, questionnaires, and analysis
• Muskogee Politico primary picks
• OCPA Legislative Scorecard
• Oklahoma Conservative PAC meeting videos, including candidate speeches
• Oklahoma Constitution Index: Scores incumbent legislators on voting record
• iVoterGuide surveys of Oklahoma statewide, federal, and legislative candidates
• City Elders Tulsa speakers' videos, including candidate speeches
• Oklahomans for Life candidate surveys
• Oklahomans for the 2nd Amendment (OK2A) endorsements
• NRA-PVF endorsements
• Oklahomans for Health and Parental Rights (OKHPR) endorsements

ANTI-CONSERVATIVE VOICES:

Here are some endorsement lists that are negative indicators:

• Oklahomans for Public Education: OPE advocates for higher taxes, opposes school choice, and opposes efforts to keep leftist advocacy out of the classroom. They work to defeat principled Republicans. A yellow warning mark from OPE is a badge of honor for a conservative candidate.
• Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition appears to be just another front for the leftist education establishment. The founder of the group, Erika Wright, opposed State Department of Education rules to keep obscene materials out of public school libraries and to keep parents informed of important mental health matters involving their children.

If you appreciate the many hours of research that went into this guide and into the rest of my election coverage, and if you'd like to help keep this site online, you can contribute to BatesLine's upkeep via PayPal. In addition to keeping me caffeinated, donated funds pay for web hosting, subscriptions, and paid databases I use for research. Many thanks to those generous readers who have already contributed.

Some final thoughts in the wee small hours of election day. Don't forget to have a look at my main election day post with my list of endorsements and links to information from other reliable sources.

Fifty years ago, filing for office happened in early July, with the primary at the end of August and the runoff three weeks later. When the candidate filings for 1974 were printed in the Tulsa Tribune, I cut the list out and pinned it to my bulletin board.

Of 520 candidates statewide who filed for county office this year, 470 are Republican, 43 are Democrat, and 7 are independent. In the 9-county Tulsa-Bartlesville-Muskogee Combined Statistical Area, 62 of the 68 candidates for county office are Republicans. Three Democrats and one independent are running for Tulsa County Commission District 2, and there's one Democrat running for that seat in Pawnee County. I recall that the proportion on my 1974 list was the exact opposite. In July 1974, registered voters numbered 991,928 Democrats, 326,167 Republicans, 19,603 independents, and 3,511 with the American Party.

In 1974, the important electoral battles happened in the Democratic primaries. Today, the real battle for control of the state legislature happens in GOP primaries across the state.

While Oklahoma Republican legislators are generally reliably conservative on social issues, the majority departs from professed Republican platform principles anytime a lobbyist with access to campaign cash strolls past their offices. They may take strong stands on social issues with immediate impact, but they let themselves be rolled by lobbyists fighting the strategic measures that will ensure a conservative future in Oklahoma.

That's why a left-leaning private organization still has legal standing as a gatekeeper to the legal profession and judicial offices in Oklahoma. It's why we can't move public school board elections to a time of year when more voters are apt to be paying attention. It's why the legislative leadership keeps trying to undermine the first effective conservative serving as State Superintendent. These people are happy to use taxpayer dollars to lure businesses without regard to whether the people they bring may turn the state "blue" over time.

Chad McCarthy, who is challenging Judd Strom in House District 10, put together an 8-page newspaper detailing the incumbent's votes for cronyism, higher fees, more spending, more regulation, less transparency, more centralized control by legislative leaders. McCarthy provides bill numbers and a paragraph on each explaining why Strom's vote violates conservative principles. I suspect there's a strong correlation with the key votes tracked by the Oklahoma Constitution newspaper and OCPA Legislative Scorecard, and you'll probably find many of the incumbents who are backed by massive campaign warchests. McCarthy calls these people the Speaker's Lemmings and notes "their love of the Capitol nightlife."

They often wine and dine with lobbyists and other politicians at night, funded on the lobbyists' dime.

This allows the lobbyists to exert sway over the legislator, and it leaves the legislator much less time for actually reading the bills and knowing what they are voting on the next day....

State records show that Strom has attended more than 175 lobbyist-funded events, a sure indicator that he's likely a card-carrying lemming.

This lazy lawmaking results in the enactment of many bad laws, and that's why, as the reader reviews the audit on the following pages of this publication, they will see so many shocking votes that are complete betrayals of our Republican values.

In 2022, Tim Brooks, my pick of four good candidates in the Senate 33 primary this year, created a bullet-point summary of House District 76 incumbent Ross Ford's six years of bad votes at the State Capitol.

The incumbents who are part of the Favor Factory at the State Capitol (and the open-seat candidates seeking to join them) have plenty of PAC money to spend on big color postcards, billboards, robocalls and robotexts, and, more recently, radio and TV ads, telling you how wonderfully conservative they are. There was a time when there were trusted voices on local radio who could dissect these ads and evaluate their claims against the actual record. Those voices are all gone now. (As happy as I am to hear Michael DelGiorno's voice in the mornings on 1300, he doesn't fulfill the need for a local talk radio host; he isn't going to be giving air time to this year's Tulsa City Council elections.)

I have a few handy heuristics for evaluating the veracity of candidates and campaign materials. I'm willing to entertain proof of exceptions, but if any of the following are true, I assume the campaign flyer is shading the truth to mislead or deceive me:

• Has the acronym "CAMP" on the bulk mail permit.
• Was paid for by a dark-money group that has no online information about its founders, leaders, or funders.

And likewise, I make a rebuttable presumption that a candidate is not going to be looking out for our interests and may already be corrupt, or on a slippery slope to that condition, if his campaign finance reports show:

• Large sums of money paid to Campaign Advocacy Management Professionals (CAMP)
• Large contributions from large numbers of special-interest PACs
• Large contributions from tribal governments

As I said, there may be and have been exceptions, but the purpose of a heuristic is to give you a good starting point for further evaluation.

MORE: I've added a last-minute update to my Corporation Commission post, remembering Brian Bingman's betrayal of conservatives on the State Senate's 2014 passage for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

To quote myself from a few years back:

There's one statewide race that ought to matter more than any other to Oklahoma voters. That's the race for a seat on the Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC). In addition to overseeing Oklahoma's oil and gas industry, the OCC regulates public utilities like PSO, ONG, and AT&T (formerly Southwestern Bell).

Considering the amount of money at stake in the OCC's decisions on utility rates, the commission is ripe for corruption. And indeed, in the late '80s and early '90s, the FBI investigated bribery allegations involving the OCC. Corporation Commissioner Bob Hopkins, a Democrat, was convicted of bribery and sent to jail, as was utility lobbyist Bill Anderson. The culture of corruption at the OCC was cracked open because, in 1989, a newly-elected commissioner went to Feds when Anderson offered him cash.

That commissioner was Bob Anthony, a man of honesty and fairness. In Anthony, Oklahoma's utility ratepayers have someone who is looking out for their interests. Regulated companies, whether large or small, get a fair shake from Bob Anthony.

Now Bob Anthony has been term-limited after 36 years looking our for the interests of Oklahoma residents and scrutinizing the claims of our monopoly utility companies on the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. Three Republicans, a Republican-turned-Democrat, and a Libertarian are running to replace him.

I'll refer you to Oklahoma Constitution's thorough story on the race and the candidates and add a few more links and comments.

Bob Anthony has endorsed Russell Ray, a journalist who spent decades covering the energy industry for newspapers and industry publications. He is currently director of communications for the Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education. Ray shares Anthony's concerns over the way utilities passed costs related to 2021's winter storm on to consumers.

The front-runner in terms of fundraising is PAC-backed Brian Bingman, former State Senate President Pro-Tempore. Bingman ran against Bob Anthony in 2018. His failure (along with Gov. Mary Fallin and leadership in the State House) to use political capital to reform state government and abolish and consolidate obsolete agencies and cut wasteful spending brought the state to the fiscal crisis of 2018. Bingman's backers put up enough money to force Anthony into a runoff, which Anthony won handily. Oklahomans, sadly, must assume that, as a corporation commissioner, Bingman will do what he did in the State Senate -- take care of the lobbyists who got him elected and not the consumers who depend on the Corporation Commission to protect our interests from the monopoly utility companies. It's basic public-choice theory: Concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs. The companies that stand to make a financial killing from favorable Corporation Commission decisions have an incentive to pour money into the race to get their man elected.

As of the June 3, 2024, pre-primary contributions and expenditures report, Bingman had raised $399,096.21, of which $60,500.66 came from PACs. By contrast, Russell Ray has only raised $1,575.00, all from individuals, and covered another $1,127.50 from his own pocket.

The Oklahoma Constitution story notes that Bingman "was one of the more moderate Republicans in the Legislature with a cumulative average of 59% on the Oklahoma Conservative Index published by the Oklahoma Constitution. He scored only 40% in his final session in 2016." [Link added.] That's a polite way of saying that Bingman bent over backwards for corporate welfare.

OK Energy Today has an informative interview with Russell Ray from April, in which Ray discusses the problem with the OCC becoming an extension of legislative leadership (which, although Ray leaves it unsaid, is owned and operated by lobbyists).

"Quite frankly I think the credibility of the commission is at stake and I think adding another member of the political establishment to the commission will make things only worse."...

Some have suggested the Corporation Commission is becoming a retirement home for former legislative leaders. Chairman Todd Hiett is a former Speaker of the House and commissioner Kim David was the Oklahoma Senate Majority Floor Leader during her last years before being term limited. If Bingman were elected, it would mean three former legislative leaders would make up the commission.

"I am my own man," declared Ray in the interview with OK Energy Today. "I do think the balance between the concerns of consumers and the concerns of business is out of balance. I think right now, the balance favors the business over the consumer--that's not good."

He went on to indicate he believes the Corporation Commisson needs to do a better job of striking the right balance betwen those two concerns and be more fair to both sides.

Russell Ray's deep knowledge of the oil & gas and power industries means he'll be able to ask incisive questions of the businesses who come before the OCC.

Ray spent his career as a journalist who covered oil and gas for the Tulsa World for 8 years and was a business reporter for the Tampa Tribune and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He also spent 9 years as Chairman of POWER- GEN International, which is the sponsor of the largest trade show for the power sector in the world. He also served as Editor-in-Chief of Power Engineering magazine.

Power Engineering is the world's largest business-to-business magazine for the power sector, serving more than 70,000 readers. Ray was responsible for all editorial content, including a regular column he wrote on energy policy, pricing and technology.

Ray was also editor of the Journal Record in Oklahoma City.

"I've written about everything, I've covered everything. I understand the trends in technology, trends in pricing and trends in policy--my point is, I think someone with that kind of knowledge and skillset is more qualified than a career politician."

Ray addresses a threat to public transparency that is backed by the two ex-legislative leaders on the Commission:

"This bill would allow commissioners to meet behind closed doors to talk about public business--I've got a big, big problem with that and every Oklahoman should have a problem with that--the risk for abuse is great."

The candidate raised the question--if HB2367 becomes law, what will stop the legislature and others from doing the same thing for every city council or school board? As written, the bill only applies to the Corporation Commission, but questions have been raised that other three-member agencies might want the same power and lead to more legislative leniency.

"This would set a dangerous precedent for the entire state when it comes to open government."

County Commissions also have only three members. I'd rather see the number of commissioners increased than for them to be exempt from the Open Meetings Law.

You'll want to read the whole article for a discussion of 2021's Winter Storm Uri and the costs that utilities have palmed off on consumers, but here's the pull quote:

"The Commission has passed on billions of dollars in higher fuel costs and higher rate increases to consumers over the last three years I think with little or no scrutiny," he declared on the same day that Corporation Commissioner Bob Anthony filed more objections to the one-page audit of PSO's storm costs.

A vote for Brian Bingman is a vote for total regulatory capture. A vote for Russell Ray is a vote for at least one voice on the OCC in favor of public accountability and transparency in the regulation of our utility rates and the oil and gas industry, with a hope for a majority on the side of accountability and transparency after the 2026 election.

UPDATE:

I had forgotten one very significant betrayal of conservative principles by Brian Bingman. In 2014, as Senate President Pro Tempore (leader of that chamber), Bingman allowed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to reach the floor of the State Senate, but he voted for it, and it passed with considerable Republican support. Under Brian Bingman's misleadership, the Oklahoma Senate was the first Red State legislative chamber to back the Left's plan to let Blue Cities (and their fraud-prone electoral practices) dominate presidential elections.

Justin Hornback, the other Republican in the race to replace Bob Anthony, reached out to me via Facebook, politely asking why I endorsed Russell Ray, despite Hornback receiving the endorsements of OK2A and OKHPR. He certainly would be preferable to Brian Bingman, and Hornback says that he has power generation industry experience as well as oil and gas experience, but I put a lot of stock in Bob Anthony's endorsement.

Karen Keith is running for Mayor of Tulsa, and seven candidates are running to replace her as Tulsa County Commissioner for District 2, three Republicans, three Democrats, and one independent.

The three Republicans are Tulsa District 2 City Councilor Jeannie Cue (sister of Keith's predecessor Randi Miller), District 68 State Representative Lonnie Sims, and small business owner Melissa Myers. The three Democrats are former Tulsa District 4 City Councilor Maria Barnes, Karen Keith's chief deputy Jim Rea, and public relations agent Sarah Gray. Josh Turley, who was the Republican nominee in 2016 and 2020, is running as an independent this year.

In the Republican primary, I'm voting for Melissa Myers. She is a graduate of Berryhill High School, married with two children, and with her husband and another couple owns Christ Centered Lawn and Landscape. The company provided Christmas lighting this year for the rooflines of Sand Springs' historic downtown buildings.

While all three GOP candidates live within some city's limits, Myers lives in the Prattville section of Sand Springs, the closest of the Republican candidates to the large unincorporated regions of the district, where residents are entirely dependent upon county government for road maintenance and law enforcement.

Myers has been endorsed by Oklahomans for the Second Amendment (OK2A) and Oklahomans for Health and Parental Rights. KRMG's Russell Mills interviewed Melissa Myers in February after she announced her candidacy.

Myers got her political feet wet when she advocated for keeping at least part of the Gilcrease Turnpike free. While she wasn't successful in the effort, it gave her experience in the conflict between local needs and the priorities of government agencies. One of Myers's priorities is transparency in the county commissioner's office and the operations of the budget board.

As a city councilor, Jeannie Cue devotes a great deal of time to being attentive to the needs of the neighborhoods in her district, and I'm sure that would carry over to the County Commission. Where she falls short is as a watchdog.

(Here is Jeannie Cue's interview with KRMG.)

A prime example is when the Tulsa City Council approved federal COVID recovery grant money to fund a sex survey targeting teenagers as young as 15. When I raised the issue at a meeting of the Tulsa Area Republican Assembly where Cue was present, she was very concerned to hear that the survey was being promoted on the Tulsa Parks Facebook page, and she made some phone calls the following day, resulting in the deletion of the Tulsa Parks Facebook post. She was kind enough to follow up with me as well.

Here's the problem: Jeannie Cue was a member of the four-member council committee (with Phil Lakin, Lori Decter Wright, and Vanessa Hall Harper) that "vetted" the non-profit applications, including that of Amplify Tulsa. She had the opportunity to flag this grant as a misuse of public money, particularly money intended to help Tulsans recover from the COVID shutdowns, but there's no indication that she raised an objection. Her shocked reaction when I discussed the grant at the TARA meeting suggests that she didn't exercise due care and attention when it had been before the committee.

When we elect someone to a seat at the table in government, it's reasonable to expect her to use her position to investigate and scrutinize government on our behalf, through the lens of the priorities and values of the voters who elected her. Councilor Cue has demonstrated that she's not very good at that.

The third Republican candidate is State Rep. Lonnie Sims, whose House district covers much of the County Commission district west of the Arkansas River. Sims is the big-money candidate in the race, and he has an abysmal voting record at the State Capitol. In the Oklahoma Constitution's Conservative Index of 10 key votes for the 2023 legislative session, Sims scored 40%, a failing grade, and his career average was 61%, reflecting his support for corporate welfare. (Does a billionaire-owned NBA team really need special tax breaks?) Sims has a lifetime average of 59% on OCPA's Legislative Scorecard, which records Sims's support for the interests of tribal officials over the general public and his backing of bills to undermine Oklahoma's anti-SLAPP law. He's using the same campaign consultants that are supporting Democrat Karen Keith's bid for mayor.

I encourage Democrats in Commission District 2 to vote for Maria Barnes. As a city councilor for four years in my district, Barnes represented the interests of homeowners and neighborhoods over special interests; that's why she was targeted for defeat in 2008 and again in 2011, by means of big money and (in 2011) Dewey Bartlett Jr's gerrymander. I've described her as a neighborhood servant whose years in the trenches with the Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Association and the Midtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations shaped her into an effective elected official, a true public servant. Although we disagree on many national political issues, Maria and I share many concerns about the way local government bodies treat their citizens. I appreciate her frankness. She's willing to take a principled stand and not back down under pressure. As a county commissioner, she would not be anyone's fool.

Jim Rea, Karen Keith's chief deputy, bought a house in the district barely in time to meet the six-month residency requirement, and his candidacy was challenged by his Democrat opponents on the basis that ownership alone doesn't constitute residency. The state law defining residence is fairly loose, so the county election board had to allow him to remain on the ballot, but voters may and should take his short tenure in the district into account. Rea's LinkedIn profile indicates that he's only been back in Tulsa for about five years, serving for the last two as Keith's chief deputy.

Sarah Gray's website gives the impression that she's a caring person who doesn't understand the duties and powers of the office she seeks.

BatesLine endorsed Josh Turley during his two attempts to unseat Karen Keith. Turley has a doctorate in organizational leadership, had a distinguished 24-year career at the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office, serving as the TCSO's first civilian crime scene investigator and developing the department's first Risk Management program, which succeeded in reducing car accidents involving deputies and tort claim payouts. Turley independently developed policies and procedures to be used by smaller sheriff's offices and county jails to improve performance and minimize risk. As an independent candidate, Turley will not be on the ballot until November.

Here are the campaign finance reports filed by the candidates to date with the Tulsa County Election Board. Note that only Sims and Rea filed the pre-primary contributions and expenditures report that was due yesterday. Cue and Myers filed contributions and expenditures reports covering the first quarter of 2024. Barnes and Gray have yet to file a contributions and expenditures report.

• Jeannie Cue: Statement of Organization, Continuing Report of Contributions
• Melissa Myers: Statement of Organization, Contributions and Expenditures
• Lonnie Sims: Statement of Organization, Contributions and Expenditures
• Maria Barnes: Statement of Organization
• Sarah Gray: Statement of Organization
• Jim Rea: Statement of Organization, Contributions and Expenditures

MORE: Cheryl Wilburg recorded and posted most of the county commissioner debate sponsored by the Tulsa County GOP, after the live feed started having problems.

UPDATE 2024/05/29: Brent VanNorman has announced that he is running for mayor and will be holding a campaign kickoff Thursday evening, May 30, 2024. And see below for his comment regarding his business and ESG.

This past Wednesday, Jayme Fowler, 65, City Councilor for District 9, announced his withdrawal from the race for Mayor of Tulsa. Fowler is a registered Republican who entered the race last September. In an interview with KRMG, Fowler cited polling data and difficulty raising money and said that he didn't see a path to victory.

Fowler plans to complete his term but will not switch to running for re-election to his council seat. Former state representative Carol Bush and Julie Dunbar have both filed campaign contribution and expenditure reports for the District 9 seat with the Tulsa City Clerk. Dunbar is the wife of former Tulsa District 8 City Councilor Todd Huston. Both candidates are registered Republicans.

In his first quarter campaign filings, Fowler reported raising $126,865 through March 31, 2024, lending $119,500 to his own campaign, and carrying over $29,585 that he had lent his previous city council campaign, and spending $145,230 to that date on his mayoral campaign. Maximum donors in his latest report included Robert Zinke, Aaron Dillard of First Pryority Bank, Sanjay Meshri, Tom Bloomfield, and Robert Austin.

Unusually, Fowler had actually paid himself back $45,500 of his September 10, 2023, $50,000 loan to the campaign, making repayments through December 28, 2023. The typical pattern is that an unsuccessful candidate never gets paid back, while a successful candidate expects to raise money after the election from donors who hope to get into his good graces.

Fowler spent his campaign funds with Tomahawk Strategies ($61,141.92) for campaign management and consulting, Jacob Parra ($12,884.85) for campaign management, Zack Lissau ($6,000) for social media management, Patriot Reporting ($4,750) for campaign treasury services.

By contrast, Democrat County Commissioner Karen Keith raised $522,173 through March 31, but had only spent $137,043.96. Her major campaign vendors are James Martin Co ($43,997.59) for fundraising consulting, Campaign Advocacy Management Professionals LLC (CAMP) ($28,726.34) for strategic consulting, printing, website, and social media, CMA Strategies ($25,700.00) for polling, and Corey Abernathy ($16,000.00) as campaign manager.

Democrat state representative Monroe Nichols, 40, raised $318,097.19 through the 1st Quarter, and spent $278,381.83. Major vendors include Management Personnel Xchange LLC of Merrifield VA ($100,470.39) for campaign management, New Blue Interactive of Bethesda MD ($50,192.50) for digital fundraising, William H. Blanton, Jr., ($34,674.00) for fundraising consulting), Interak Corporation ($7,200.00) for office rent, Campaign Technology Professionals ($4,380.00) for bookkeeping & ethics compliance), HIT Strategies of Washington DC ($5,575.00) for polling services.

Two candidates have not been in the race long enough to have filed campaign contributions and expenditures reports.

Casey Bradford, 32, Army veteran and owner of Shady Keys Dueling Piano Bar,
entered the race in late April. He registered to vote in Tulsa County in May 2023 and is registered at an address in Sun Meadow that, according to Tulsa County Assessor records, is owned by Affluent Allianz Realty and does not have a homestead exemption.

Bradford is a member of PPE Supplies, LLC, which was formed on March 23, 2020, and contracted with the Oklahoma State Department of Health to supply N95 masks. In April 2021, the state sued Bradford and PPE Supplies. According to filings in the case, OSDH paid PPE Supplies a deposit of $2.125 million for purchase orders totaling 1.9 million masks; PPE Supplies only supplied 10,000 masks, and reimbursed the state $300,000, claiming that the remaining funds had been paid to vendors and was due to be reimbursed. Bradford and PPE Supplies filed a third-party petition against companies based in Kuwait, Cambodia, China, and Washington State, with documents showing that $1.74 million had been wired by PPE Supplies to these companies. Documents attached to the third-party suit indicate that PPE Supplies learned on May 6, 2020, that the promised masks had instead been sent to Mongolia, and PPE Supplies began to work through its attorney to recover the funds from the international suppliers. The COVID-19 March 2020 panic led many states to go outside of their normal purchasing processes to acquire N95 masks, ventilators, and other medical and protective equipment. An order by U. S. District Judge Claire Eagan in a related federal case contains a narrative of the controversy and sheds some light on the connections between the parties.

Brent VanNorman, 63, who had previously declared for District 2 City Council, is expected to announce a switch to run for mayor. Although he registered as a Republican voter in Tulsa County in September 2021, he is president of TriLinc Global, an investment company based in Manhattan Beach, California, which uses Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) screening for its investments. Leftists have used ESG investing to place financial pressure on oil and gas companies and manufacturers of personal firearms and ammunition and to force companies to adopt woke approaches to hiring and promotion. Where leftists have failed to get laws and regulations passed to enforce their agenda, they have had some success with pressure via large institutional investors pushing ESG. Basically, ESG is an indirect way for the Left to attack access to affordable energy and the freedom of movement that goes with it and our exercise of our Second Amendment rights.

UPDATE 2024/05/29: Brent VanNorman reached out with this information on his company: "I can assure you I am a solid conservative. The ESG that TriLinc uses is nothing similar to the likes of BlackRock. We simply use it as a negative screen to ensure that we are not investing in companies that are involved in pornography, gambling, illegal drugs, child labor, etc. TriLinc was founded and is run by people that are very conservative."

VanNorman's voter registration address as of 2022 was at an apartment at The Enclave at Brookside. His current address is near Tulsa Hills, which, according to Tulsa County Assessor records, was sold to the VanNorman Revocable Trust on March 1, 2023; no homestead exemption is shown.

Candidates for mayor, all 9 city council seats, and city auditor will formally file to be on the 2024 ballot Monday, June 10, through Wednesday, June 12, at the Tulsa County Election Board, 555 N. Denver Ave. For races that draw more than two candidates, a primary will be held concurrent with the Oklahoma primary runoff election on August 2024; the city general election will coincide with the federal and state general election on November 5, 2024.

Several Tulsa County legislative seats are open because of term limits, so the Tulsa County Republican Party is hosting a series of debates for contested primaries for State House and State Senate. I will be moderating the Senate 25 debate on May 30th. (Debates for HD 67 and SD 33 have already taken place.) All debates will begin at 6 pm and end at 8 pm.

Tuesday, May 28, 2024, 6 pm - 8 pm
House District 79
Hicks Park Community Center

Candidates:

• Jenifer Stevens
• Paul Hassink

Thursday, May 30, 2024, 6 pm - 8 pm
Senate District 25
Hardesty Library

Candidates:

• Jeff Boatman
• Brian Guthrie

Monday, June 10, 2024, 6 pm - 8 pm
Senate District 37 & House District 68 (Separately)
The Hive (Jenks)

Candidates (SD37):

• Cody Rogers
• Aaron Reinhardt

Candidates (HD68):

• Mike Lay
• Jonathan Grable

Published February 29, 2024. Postdated to keep it at the top of the page until the polls close.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024, is Oklahoma's presidential primary. On election day, polls are open from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. You'll be able to cast an early ballot at one or more locations in each county at the following times, which includes Saturday as it's a federal election:

• Thursday, February 29, 2024: 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
• Friday, March 1, 2024: 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
• Saturday, March 2, 2024: 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Tulsa County will have early voting at Fair Meadows, 4609 E. 21st Street. This is a brand new location for early voting. Wagoner County, which will be voting on eight propositions affecting a total of 1.8 cents in county sales tax as well as a 5% lodging tax, has two early-voting locations: NSU Broken Arrow Campus, 3100 E New Orleans St., and First Baptist Church, Wagoner, 401 NE 2nd Street.

If you need help finding your polling place, or if you'd like to study a sample ballot before you go, the Oklahoma State Election Board has a one-stop-shop online voter tool. Put in your name and date of birth, and they'll look you up in the database, find your polling place and show you a photo of it and a map, will let you see a printable sample ballot, and, if you're voting absentee, it will show you when your ballot arrived at your county election board. Many precinct boundaries have changed since the last presidential cycle, and precinct locations may have changed very recently, so double-check before you head for the polls, and don't forget to bring your photo ID.

The presidential preference primary is the only thing on the ballot in Tulsa County. Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians all have a presidential primary, and Democrats have invited independent voters to vote in their primary.

By party in order of filing:

Republican:

• Donald J. Trump, 77, Palm Beach, FL, former President
• Nikki Haley, 51, Kiawah Island, SC, former Governor of South Carolina and Ambassador to the United Nations
• Ron DeSantis, 45, Tallahassee, FL, Governor of Florida and former congressman
• Chris Christie, 61, Mendham, NJ, former Governor of New Jersey
• Ryan L. Binkley, 56, Dallas, TX, pastor and entrepreneur
• David Stuckenberg, 42, Tampa, FL, founder and CEO of tech company
• Asa Hutchinson, 73, Rogers, AR, former Governor of Arkansas
• Vivek Ramaswamy, 38, Columbus, OH, pharmaceutical company founder

Democrat:

• Dean Phillips, 54, Wayzata, MN, congressman
• Joseph R Biden Jr, 81, Wilmington, DE, current resident of the White House
• Armando Mando Perez-Serrato, 47, Orange, CA. Mando doesn't say much about himself, but has strong opinions about his Democratic opponents.
• Marianne Williamson, 71, Washington, DC, novelist
• Stephen Lyons, 62, Damascus, MD, plumbing company owner
• Cenk Uygur, 53, Los Angeles, CA, blogger and podcaster

Libertarian:

Jacob Hornberger, 73, Broadlands, VA, lawyer, president of the Future of Freedom Foundation
Chase Oliver, 38, Atlanta, GA, self-described activist

Joseph "Joe Exotic Tiger King" Maldonado is running for president as a Democrat from federal prison in Texas, but he is not on the Oklahoma ballot.

The Green Papers has the nitty-gritty of delegate allocation rules for Oklahoma Republicans and Democrats. In a nutshell, Democrat delegates are allocated proportionally for each congressional district and statewide, but a candidate must have at least 15% of the vote to receive any delegates. Republicans use a semi-proportional method in each congressional district (3 delegates each): If a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, he gets all the delegates in that jurisdiction. If two candidates get more than 15%, the one with the most votes gets 2 delegates and 2nd place gets 1. If three candidates get more than 15% all three get a delegate. The 28 statewide at-large delegates are allocated proportionally among candidates who have at least 15% of the vote, but if any candidate gets more than 15% of the vote, he gets all 28. It's possible, if a big enough proportion of the vote goes to candidates with less than 15% of the vote, for some number of uncommitted delegates to be allocated.

I will be voting for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary. More about that in another entry. I encourage Wagoner County voters to defeat the eight tax proposals on their ballot and demand that their county commissioners consult with the public before putting a massive tax increase on the ballot.

In my pre-presidential primary post, I provide a detailed explanation of the delegate allocation process for Oklahoma. As I mentioned in the same post, I am voting for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Oklahoma Republican Primary.

A BatesLine reader asked me why the names of so many candidates are still going to be on the ballot, even though some dropped out weeks ago. The ballot was set in stone shortly after the end of the filing period in early December. It takes time to design and print ballots and to program ballot scanners to correctly tabulate that ballot design. Absentee ballots have to go out early, particularly for Oklahomans serving in the military. There's no time to reprint ballots. Ever year we've had a presidential primary, we've had no-longer active candidates on the ballot, and we often have barely- or never-active candidates running for city, county, and state offices. Even if a candidate isn't sending mail pieces or doing robocalls, you're still allowed to vote for him or her.

You might think that all this is moot. We appear to be headed for a Trump-Biden rematch. All but three of the Republican candidates (Trump, Haley, Stuckenburg) have suspended their campaigns. There hasn't been a serious primary challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, and only in the unusual circumstances of 1976, with an unelected incumbent, did a challenge have a real shot at succeeding. The Oklahoma County Republican Party is hosting an Official Trump Victory Party tomorrow night, a significant departure from the mandatory neutrality expected of party organizations during an active primary campaign.

But in the grand sweep of American history, the idea that you must actively campaign for president is a relative novelty. In 1952, within living memory, Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't give his first campaign speech until June 4, after the last primary had already been held. Eisenhower couldn't engage in partisan political activity until then; he was still on active duty as commander of NATO forces in Europe until May 31.

Democratic Party rule changes after 1968 began the movement toward binding primaries that put a premium on expensive mass media spending, but it wasn't until the advent of Super Tuesday in 1988 that the weight of the nominating process shifted definitively from caucuses and conventions to primaries. It was not unreasonable, as recently as 1968, for the incumbent president not to bother filing for primaries or to actively campaign.

Recently, Tara Ross wrote of the reluctance with which George Washington accepted his election to the presidency. Electors were elected in some states by popular vote and were appointed by the legislature in others, and each elector, at that time, cast two ballots. Every elector cast one of his ballots for Washington, with John Adams winning a majority of the remaining ballots, scattered among 11 candidates. None of the candidates actively campaigned for office. Electors cast their ballots for Washington not knowing if he would accept.

The vision of the Framers of the Constitution was that citizens would choose a trusted and knowledgeable neighbor from their city or region to represent them in the Electoral College, and that electors from each state would deliberate and cast ballots for the public servant best equipped to head serve as Chief Executive of the federal government. No campaigning would be necessary, because the electors would have the solemn obligation and privilege to research possible candidates, their successes and failures, their strengths and flaws. Ideally, ambition-driven campaigning would be viewed as unseemly and disqualifying.

But now presidential candidates must raise tens of millions of dollars and begin campaign efforts as soon as the midterm elections are over. To win the nomination, you must win primaries, which means you must reach a vast number of primary voters who are barely paying attention, and to get their attention you need money for TV ads, direct mail, robocalls and robotexts, and people to manage all of that, plus the ground game. Underperforming expectations in an early state means the money dries up; donors are no longer willing to invest in your future prospects.

In 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis managed to win re-election by 20 percentage points in what had been a purple state (remember 2000?), while the expected "Red Wave" failed to materialize anywhere else. DeSantis used his power as governor effectively to accomplish a conservative agenda, removing two Soros-backed district attorneys who refused to prosecute crimes, dismantling DEI bureaucracies at the state's universities, re-creating the state's New College as a classical liberal arts college with a governing board filled with conservative thinkers like anti-woke campaigner Christopher Rufo, and defied the mighty Disney Corporation. While Trump was celebrating the vaccine he fast-tracked, DeSantis's appointed state Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, issued a caution for young men because of a higher risk of heart-related adverse effects.

At the heart of all of these DeSantis successes was a focus on results: understanding and wielding the authority that the voters had granted him to accomplish the priorities that he had promised the voters, hiring and appointing people with the intelligence, diligence, and character to accomplish the goals he set. You do not hear DeSantis or his fans making excuses for failure, mainly because he hasn't had many failures; DeSantis just gets things done.

DeSantis's polling lead began to disappear as partisan prosecutors began filing case after case attempting to put former president Donald Trump in prison or at least off of the ballot. Understandably but mistakenly, many Republican voters felt that the only way to defy politically motivated misuses of the justice system was to rally behind Trump. Trump and his allies attacked DeSantis's admirable record, minimizing his achievements and even making wild and ridiculous false claims (e.g., the guy who ousted two Soros DAs is somehow Soros's puppet). Trump ran to DeSantis's left on abortion, transgenderism, and woke Disney.

Trump and his followers asserted that Trump did not need to earn the 2024 GOP nomination but was owed it. DeSantis was accused of what seems to be the greatest crime in the opinion of too many: Being disloyal to Trump. To these people, it doesn't matter who would be the most effective Republican nominee and conservative chief executive: Loyalty, not to principle, not even to a party, but to one man, is the supreme virtue and disloyalty the unforgivable sin.

I rarely take time to watch movies -- I tend to unwind with a classic sitcom episode -- but a couple of months ago during a business trip, I took the time to re-watch a film I had seen and enjoyed, The Death of Stalin, Armando Ianucci's dark comedy about the power struggle around the demise of the murderous Soviet leader, starring Jeffrey Tambour as Gyorgy Malenkov and Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev. I followed it up with Downfall, a German-language dramatization of the final days of Hitler in his Berlin bunker, based in part on the account of the young woman who was the genocidal dictator's personal secretary.

Shortly after the latter film was released, there was a frequently recurring video meme that repurposed the scene where Hitler has a conniption after the generals tell him that the remaining armies are unable to come to the rescue; new subtitles were added to adapt the scene to imagine various famous people reacting to bad news, for example, Hillary Clinton learning that she is about to lose the 2008 Democratic nomination for president to Barack Obama (language warning). Hilarious adaptations aside, Downfall is an enthralling, thought-provoking film.

The common element in the two movies is that, despite the terminal weakness of Dear Leader -- Stalin has had a stroke and lost control of his bladder and bowels, Hitler reigns over less than a square mile of territory and will soon kill himself -- his minions fall all over themselves to affirm their loyalty. These appear to be men of intelligence and leadership, they see that Dear Leader is leading the nation to disaster, there are enough of them to band together and push him out of power -- and yet they cannot break free. In Death of Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov (played by Michael Palin) loudly denounces his wife for crimes against the state and justifies dead Stalin's decision to imprison and presumably execute her, right until the moment she walks back through the door of their flat.

Now, Donald Trump is no genocidal autocrat, and he did a great deal of good during his term of office, but these movies brought to mind the cult of personality that has surrounded him and which he actively encourages. Nothing Trump does is ever a mistake. It may seem like a mistake that he appointed numerous cabinet members whom he now denounces as disloyal idiots, but really he is playing 10-dimensional chess and only seeming to fail in order to expose the swamp. Elected officials, hoping for a share of the public adulation Trump enjoys, fall all over themselves to praise Trump, to claim his endorsement, and to make excuses for him. Trump made many unforced errors, but he does not show any indication of having learned from his mistakes to become a more strategic, focused, and self-disciplined leader.

The November election may very well end up as a rematch between Trump and Biden (or more likely, the Democrats will replace Biden after Trump is officially nominated by the Republican National Convention), but for now we have a much better choice on tomorrow's primary ballot.

If enough of us who understand that Ron DeSantis is the best choice vote for him, he can win delegates to the national convention. Maybe God will bless us, as He has blessed Florida, with better leadership than we deserve.

In addition to Oklahoma's presidential preference primary on March 5, 2024, a small number of local jurisdictions will have propositions: Haskell, Norman, Oilton (2), Dewey County, Logan County (3), McIntosh County, Major County, and Sharon-Mutual Public Schools (Dewey & Woodward Counties). One school district, Mannsville in Carter & Johnston Counties, has a special election for an unexpired board seat.

The longest ballot will be in Wagoner County, which has eight propositions relating to county sales taxes:

• Proposition No. 1: Make permanent the temporary 0.80% for operations and road and bridge improvements, originally approved in 2017
• Proposition No. 2: Make permanent the temporary 0.10% for Sheriff Office capital outlay and operations, originally approved in 2017
• Proposition No. 3: Make permanent the temporary 0.10% for General Fund purposes, originally approved in 2017
• Proposition No. 4: Repurpose half of the permanent 0.30% fire tax approved in 2004 to establish and provide ambulance service.
• Proposition No. 5: 0.125% for 30 years for courthouse facilities
• Proposition No. 6: 0.25% permanent for jail facilities and operations
• Proposition No. 7: 0.125% for 30 years for fairgrounds facilities
• Proposition No. 8: 5% lodging tax in unincorporated areas for parks and recreational facilities

Proponents call the package "Half a Penny for Wagoner County," referring to the new taxes in propositions 5, 6, and 7, but not considering the increase in taxes resulting from making a penny in temporary taxes permanent. The Wagoner County website has a PowerPoint with details on each proposition "for educational purposes only... does not imply an endorsement."

Some opposition has arisen, pointing out that this amounts to a 38% increase in the county's sales tax rate, from 1.3 cents to 1.8 cents on the dollar. That's on top of the state 4.5% sales tax and any city sales taxes. A group called Taxed Enough Already (TEA) points out that this will push total sales tax rates in the cities of Coweta and Wagoner up to 10.3%. Compare that to the combined 8.417% we pay in the City of Tulsa. While Gov. Stitt just signed a bill eliminating the state sales taxes on groceries, to go into effect in August, city and county sales taxes will continue to be imposed on necessities.

John Dobberstein of the Broken Arrow Sentinel has a detailed report on the Wagoner County propositions, specifically on a presentation made by Wagoner County Engineer Rachael Cooper to the Broken Arrow City Council. "Cooper admitted no public hearings had been scheduled about the tax proposals but they would be forthcoming in the next 60 days." The same article has links to the ballot resolutions approved by the Wagoner County Commission and notes the haste with which the propositions were moved forward.

District 1 Wagoner County Commissioner James Hanning said information was given to him about the propositions the morning of a recent County Commission meeting and he was asked to vote to whether approve the language with no prior knowledge.

Hanning said he didn't know how the numbers were created but he was unsure 0.8% would be satisfactory or even enough to maintain roads in the county.

"We all, as well as Broken Arrow see the destruction of our roads and how much more it's costing us to fix them. So I don't know where the numbers came from. I'm simply telling you they were never presented to me," he told the Broken Arrow City Council after Cooper's presentation to them.

Firefighters in rural fire districts are unhappy that their permanent earmarked revenue stream is going to be cut in half (emphasis added).

Everyone agrees Wagoner County needs an ambulance service, and service should be improved across the county, but firefighters say taking away funds their departments rely on would hurt their ability to maintain equipment, attend training, or recruit and retain firefighters.

On Monday night, firefighters asked County Commissioner Christina Edwards about what data supports the cut.

Edwards, who supports the ballot measure, was unable to answer the question.

The community also asked County Commissioner Tim Kelly, who also supports the proposal, the same question in a separate meeting.

His response was, "I get it. That's all you need to know."

Kelly was asked if he could provide the statistics and he said he could if he wanted to....

Another concern firefighters have is the county acknowledges never consulting any of the fire departments before proposing the idea.

I don't live in Wagoner County, but I would be reluctant to approve a permanent earmarked tax or any temporary tax longer than 5 years duration, as it eliminates opportunities for rebalancing revenues and priorities as costs and needs change. The need for Proposition No. 4 illustrates the hazard: Those who believe that the 0.30% fire district sales tax is generating more revenue than needed for that purpose now have to fight the holders of the concentrated benefit to repurpose the tax.

It's sketchy, to put it mildly, to schedule a sales tax election on a low-turnout date, with no hearings prior to the vote to put the propositions on the ballot and even one of the County Commissioners apparently kept in the dark. That kind of behavior by elected officials shouldn't be rewarded by the voters.

MORE:

KTUL: Wagoner County's 'half a penny campaign' draws debate over real cost of tax propositions
KOTV: Special Election In Wagoner County Could Impact Sales Tax
Group of Wagoner County residents holds rally against proposed sales tax increase

ELECTION RESULTS: Tulsa County school district bond issues all passed by a wide margin, each proposition exceeding 80% in favor. School bond issues fell short of the 60% threshold in Canute, Krebs, Silo, and Tupelo. In Boswell, Tuttle, and Weleetka school districts, a majority of voters voted against the bond propositions.

Worst turnout: Nobody -- zero of 21 registered voters -- in the Billings Public Schools district in Garfield County showed up to vote on adding themselves to the Garfield County 522 Ambulance Service District in the Billings Public Schools district. According to the Enid News, there were four propositions across the county relating to the ambulance service: Voters in the existing ambulance district cast two separate votes to annex into the district the parts of the Billings and Pond Creek-Hunter school districts in Garfield County, approving by 132-6 and 128-7, respectively. Voters in the affected part of Pond Creek-Hunter voted 11-5 in favor. Presumably annexation needed approval from both the existing district and the area to be annexed; with a tie 0-0 vote, it appears that the Billings annexation (about 32.25 sq. mi. in the northeast corner of the county) will not go forward.

In the entire state of Oklahoma, with over 400 school districts, each with at least one seat up for election this year, there were only 22 seats that required a primary because more than two candidates ran. In 13 of those 22 seats, a candidate received more than 50% of the vote and was elected; a runoff between the top two candidates will held for only 9 seats.

This coming Tuesday, February 13, 2024, is Oklahoma's annual school board primary election. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. A list of all of Tuesday's elections across Oklahoma can be found on the Oklahoma State Election Board website. You can access your sample ballot on the election board's Oklahoma voter portal.

As one of 10 election days authorized by law this year, Tuesday is also host to some municipal elections and special elections, including several school district general-obligation bond issues. As in all non-Federal Oklahoma elections, early voting is available the Thursday and Friday before election day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at designated locations; in Tulsa County and most counties, that's at the county election board headquarters.

Only a small percentage of Tulsa County voters will have a reason to go to the polls. The only school board races on the ballot this Tuesday are those that drew three or more candidates. If a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote this Tuesday, he or she will be elected; if not, the top two candidates will advance to the school board general election on April 2, 2024, which is where you will find school board elections that have only two candidates.

There are several contested school board seats in Tulsa County, including three in the Tulsa Public Schools district, but all of them drew only two candidates, so you will see them on the ballot in April.

In Tulsa County, there are general obligation bond issues in Bixby, Sand Springs, and Jenks school districts, and a single city council seat each in Collinsville and Sand Springs.

Bixby school bond issues:

• School district web page on the bond issue
• Bixby bond issue Bond Transparency Act disclosure: The district has $192,440,000 left to be paid off from the 2022 and 2016 bond issues.
• Proposition No. 1: $11,500,000 "for the purpose of constructing, equipping, repairing and remodeling school buildings, acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment and acquiring and improving school sites"
• Proposition No. 2: $500,000 "for the purpose of purchasing transportation equipment"

Jenks school bond issues:

• School district web page on the bond issue
• Jenks bond issue Bond Transparency Act disclosure: "The School District has 49,945,000 in unissued building bonds authorized at an election held on the 10th day of February 2015." The disclosure lists specific bond expenditures from each election going back to 2019.
• Proposition No. 1: $18,180,000 "for the purpose of constructing, equipping, repairing and remodeling school buildings, acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment and acquiring and improving school sites"
• Proposition No. 2: $820,000 "for the purpose of purchasing transportation equipment"

Sand Springs school bond issues:

• School district web page on the bond issue
• Sand Springs bond issue Bond Transparency Act disclosure: The disclosure lists specific bond expenditures from each election going back to 2009. Sand Springs district has $23,308,959 in outstanding bond debt, including principal and interest.
• Proposition No. 1: $111,875,000 "for the purpose of improving or acquiring school sites, constructing, repairing, remodeling and equipping school buildings, and acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment; or in the alternative to acquire all or a distinct portion of such property pursuant to a lease purchase arrangement"
• Proposition No. 2: $2,625,000 "for the purpose of acquiring transportation equipment and auxiliary transportation equipment; or in the alternative to acquire all or a distinct portion of such property pursuant to a lease purchase arrangement"

For each candidate, ballot name is followed by full voter registration name in parentheses, if different, then age, party of voter registration, social media profiles and websites.

Collinsville city council, Ward 1:

• Brad Francis (Orville Brad Francis), incumbent, 76, R. LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile.
• Gary Cole (Gary D Cole Sr), 68, R. Facebook profile.

(Larry Shafer was the only candidate for mayor and has been re-elected.)

Sand Springs city council, Ward 4:

• Brian Jackson (Brian Michael Jackson), incumbent, 41, I. LinkedIn, Facebook profile. Jackson ran in the Republican primary for State House District 66 in 2018. He finished 2nd in the primary then lost to Jadine Nollan in the runoff. He changed registration from Republican to Independent sometime between the primary and November 2.
• David B. Parker, 61, R. LinkedIn profile, real estate Facebook page, personal Facebook profile.

(Beau Wilson, Ward 5, and Jim Spoon, at-large, were the only candidates in their respective races and have been re-elected.)

Here's a brief introduction to the six candidates running for three seats Tulsa Public Schools Board of Education, drawing on public information, including filing information, voter registration records, and social media accounts. All addresses are in the City of Tulsa. Because there are only two candidates in each race, each seat will be decided on Tuesday, April 2, 2024. I will add links to this page as more social media accounts are discovered and campaign websites are stood up, and this page will have a link to detailed candidate profiles later in the campaign season.

A brief panic during the filing period suggests nervousness by Tulsa's educational establishment about the outcome of these elections, in the form of letters from Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum IV, City Councilors Vanessa Hall Harper and Lori Decter Wright, State Rep. Monroe Nichols, and others urging the school board to waive board policy requiring a national search and public input in hiring a replacement for ex-Superintendent Deborah Gist and to hire Interim Superintendent Ebony Johnson to fill the permanent position immediately. The letters claimed to be concerned about local control, which appears to mean foundation control, as opposed to control by a board where three members had been recently endorsed by the voting public.

Following the process set out in board policy would have placed the hiring of a new superintendent after the seating of two or three new board members, resulting in a board that could well have a majority of four or five members who are independent of the private foundations that steered TPS policy during Gist's tenure. As Tulsa Parents Voice has documented, nearly all of the alumni of the Broad (rhymes with "road") Center for the Management of School Systems that populated the upper levels of the TPS org chart have departed this year. (The Broad Center involvement in public education has received criticism across the political spectrum; see these two 2018 articles by Betty Casey in Tulsa Kids. Eli Broad's controlling approach to "venture philanthropy" strongly resembles that taken by certain Tulsa philanthropists.)

Those executive vacancies would have been filled by a new superintendent under a new board majority, but now they can be filled by a long-time TPS administrator with a board majority of four favorable to Gist's failed policies and private foundation direction. Letters from community leaders allowed the current board majority to pretend to be responding to public demand in discarding board policy, bypassing public input and a thorough search for a new district leader. The two elected African-American women on the board, Rev. Jennettie Marshall and E'lena Ashley, voted against making Johnson permanent superintendent. Ms. Ashley commented after the vote on Facebook:

As I commend and congratulate our Dr. Ebony Johnson for her new 'permanent role' as TPS Superintendent, I am conflicted. I consider Dr. Ebony an excellent communicator and she certainly appears to have what it takes to make change.

It also saddens me that we now as the Tulsa Public Schools board have...

• set precedent for Tulsa Public Schools by throwing away the rules in which the board established to ensure we performed our due diligence and ensured we in fact did all in our powers to find the best, most qualified person to lead TPS as Superintendent.
• set precedent to 'Circumvent the Rights' of the very students we are promising to Teach and Protect.

What we're teaching our young children is that when the rules don't fit our needs or agenda, we simply ignore them or find the best most expedient solution to get around them.

That's not how our students should expect their life's decisions to be made and they most certainly shouldn't see the leaders of their schools acting in such nefarious ways.

Here are brief profiles of each of the TPS school board candidates:

TPS Office No. 2:

This is a special election to fill the seat for the remaining year of an unexpired four-year term. Judith Barba Perez was elected to this seat in 2021, winning a three-way primary with 201 votes out of 379 cast. Barba Perez resigned in 2023 after she moved out of Oklahoma, and Diamond Marshall was appointed by the board to replace her until a special election could be held. Diamond Marshall declined to file for election.

Calvin Michael Moniz, 38, 2607 E. 6th St., Independent, Voter ID 720718072. Voted 11 times in the last four years. Did not vote in the February 2021 school board election. Social media: Campaign website, LinkedIn, personal Facebook profile, campaign Facebook page, campaign Instagram, personal Instagram (private, with 1,850 followers and 2,382 posts), campaign Twitter. A personal Twitter account @CalvinMoniz is no longer online. Moniz supported bypassing board policy to make Ebony Johnson permanent superintendent without the required nationwide search and public input.

KanDee N. Washington, 56, 2211 N. Xanthus Ave., Independent, Voter ID 720570162. Voted 5 times in the last four years. Did not vote in the February 2021 school board election. Social media: Campaign Facebook page.

TPS Office No. 5:

This is a regular election. John Croisant won the open seat in 2020, finishing first in the February primary with 44% in a field of five, then narrowly winning the postponed general election in June, 52% to 48% over Shane Saunders, thanks to an 834-vote advantage in absentee ballots and early voting.

John Thomas Croisant, 62 E. Woodward Blvd., Democrat, Voter ID 720699462. Voted 12 times in the last 4 years. Voted in the 2020 primary and general school board elections. Social media: Campaign website, LinkedIn profile, campaign Facebook page, personal Facebook profile, business Facebook page. Croisant voted to bypass board policy and make Ebony Johnson permanent superintendent without the required nationwide search and public input.

Teresa Ann Peña, 1127 S. College Ave., Republican, Voter ID 720206476. Voted 4 times in the last 4 years. Voted in the 2020 general school board election. Social media: Campaign website, LinkedIn profile, campaign Facebook page, personal Facebook profile.

TPS Office No. 6:

This race is for a full four-year term for the open seat currently held by Jerry Griffin, who is not running for re-election. He defeated long-time establishment incumbent Ruth Ann Fate in 2020.

Maria Mercedes Seidler, 7057 E. 52nd St., Republican, Voter ID 801571311. Voted 10 times in the last 4 years, including the 2020 general school board election. Social media: LinkedIn profile, personal Facebook profile, personal Twitter account. Seidler spoke at the December 11 TPS board meeting in favor of following board policy and conducting a nationwide search with public input for a new permanent superintendent.

Sarah Adrianne Smith, 5431 S. 67th East Pl., Democrat, Voter ID 720429536. Voted 9 times in the last 4 years, including the 2020 general school board election. Social media: Campaign website, LinkedIn profile, campaign Facebook page, personal Facebook profile, campaign Twitter account. Smith applauded the school board's decision to bypass board policy to make Ebony Johnson permanent superintendent without the required nationwide search and public input.

UPDATE: At the close of the filing period, we have three contested races for Tulsa school board, and contests for single seats in Berryhill, Owasso, and Union. The remaining 13 seats (including two each in Keystone and Liberty and the Tulsa Tech Center seat), are uncontested. Maria Mercedes Seidler filed for TPS Office No. 6, making that a two-woman contest for the open seat. Alan Staab filed but withdrew for TPS Office No. 5, so there are no Tulsa County contests with more than two candidates, and there will be no February 13 primary; all of these races will be settled on April 2, 2024. (Backup copy of candidate filings.candidatefilings_12082023.pdf)

Today, Wednesday, December 6, 2023, is the final day of filing for school board races in every public school district across Oklahoma. Candidates may file at the county election board until 5 p.m. today.

K-12 school districts will have a single seat, Office No. 4, up for election to a five-year term. K-8 dependent districts (Keystone is the only one in Tulsa County) have three seats that rotate through three-year terms, and also have a single seat on the ballot. Each year one of 7 Technology Center seats is on the ballot for a 7-year term; this year that is Office No. 1.

Tulsa, with 7 board members, has two seats up for a four-year term (No. 5 and No. 6) and the one-year unexpired term of Office No. 2.

After the second day of filing in Tulsa County, 13 seats have drawn only one candidate, 2 seats (Berryhill and Owasso) have drawn two candidates, and in Tulsa Office No. 5, incumbent John Croisant has drawn two challengers. No one has filed for Liberty Office No. 4.

Nor has any candidate filed for the Tulsa Technology Center Office No. 1, not even incumbent Rev. Dr. Ray Owens, pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church and a board member of several non-profit organizations. This district mainly covers North Tulsa, from 11th Street South to 86th Street North, mainly west of Yale, plus Gilcrease Hills and neighborhoods just west of downtown.

Filing is also open for a number of municipalities; candidates have filed for city office in Collinsville, Owasso, and Sand Springs.

(Here is the a link to the latest list of candidates for Tulsa County school board and city council seats.)

School board filing always comes at a busy and distracted time of year. As I've written before, it's almost as if school board elections were deliberately scheduled to escape the notice of potential candidates and voters.

The school board primary election will be held on February 13, 2024, for those seats where there are three or more candidates. If no one wins a majority of the vote in the February election, a runoff will be held on April 2, 2024. If a seat draws only two candidates, the election will be held on April 2, 2024.

The Tulsa district, largest in the state, has two out of seven seats up for election to a four-year term, Offices No. 5 and 6, plus the remaining one-year term of Office No. 2, previously held by Judith Barba-Perez, who resigned earlier this year. As mentioned, incumbent John Croisant, first elected in 2020, is being challenged by retired TPS teacher Theresa Pena and Alan Staab. The Board appointed Diamond Marshall to serve District 2 until this year's school elections; the winner of this election will serve just one year. Marshall has not filed for election, but Calvin Michael Moniz has, and Candee Washington is expected to file as well.

Jerry Griffin, the incumbent in District 6, is not expected to run for re-election; he upset 24-year incumbent Ruth Ann Fate in 2020. So far Sarah Smith is the only candidate for that seat. Based on the age (45) listed on the filing, this is Democrat Sarah Adrienne Smith, registered to vote at 5431 S 67 E PL. (I don't know why the filing list omits addresses, which help to disambiguate names. There are 21 Sarah Smiths in Tulsa County, 9 in the Tulsa Public School District, 2 in Election District 6.) Her campaign kickoff was co-hosted by former Tulsa County Democratic Party chairman Keith McArtor. Here is Sarah Smith's personal Facebook profile. She is using the left-wing ActBlue platform for campaign donations.

You'll find a map of Tulsa Public Schools board districts here. District 2 is mainly between Admiral and Pine, with a bit of territory south to 11th Street around TU and Will Rogers High School. Booker T. Washington High School is also within District 2's boundaries. District 5 is mainly midtown west of Yale, around Edison High School, and District 6 is midtown from roughly Yale to Mingo.

Back during the 2019 filing period, I wrote at length about why school board races are so important, why they deserve much more attention than they receive, and why it's a shame that so few candidates run and so few voters turn out. During the pandemic school closures of 2020, parents and the general public began to learn more about what their children were being taught (and often how little they were being taught). More people are alert to what's at stake, and Tulsa has had some very contentious elections in recent years. We're hoping that trend will continue, but with more victories for school board members who will ask tough questions of the administration, who will represent the community's values and priorities, and who will stop the use of schools as missionary outposts for the Gramscian Left.