Ballot box holds secrets of rigged mountain election

Lost for decades, the wooden box with an iron hinged lid sits safely beside a Bible on the coffee table of R.L. Clark's home. Inside are remnants of a well-oiled political machine that ruled Madison County half a century ago.

Talk about opening Pandora's box. Or Ponder's box, in this case.

The box holds ballots from Madison's 1964 primary election with X's penciled beside the notorious name of Zeno Ponder, the county's longtime Democratic kingpin.

On election night, the first results showed that Ponder had carried his home county with 5,269 votes.

Turns out, there weren't that many registered voters eligible to cast ballots in Madison County's precincts, and the rigged results were thrown out by the state Board of Elections.

Clark, a former state senator himself, knew he had to get his hands on this piece of shady political history when the box came to light in a charity auction a few months ago.

"The Ponders were ruthless," recalled Clark, a die-hard Republican.

The Ponders ran a county in which the sheriff didn't carry a gun, but the younger brother, head of the school board, often did.

Sheriff E.Y. Ponder was well-liked and genial, a small man with white hair who disliked uniforms. He had been elected sheriff by 31 votes in 1950 and served as only the second Democrat to hold the Madison office until his defeat by Dedrick Brown, a former deputy and Republican, in 1986.

His younger brother, Zeno, favored a pencil-thin mustache and bow ties. He had gone to college and worked on uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, before he returned to his native county to build a better political machine.

Zeno ran only once for public office, but served for a dozen years as the appointed school board chairman. He stirred more mixed emotions, battling with Republicans at every turn before his death in 1994.

In Madison County, politics can run thick as blood. A 1863 massacre of Union sympathizers in Shelton Laurel would earn the county the nickname of "Bloody Madison." Clark's own maternal grandmother was a Shelton from that precinct, long known as a Republican stronghold.

A century after the Civil War, bad blood still ran in the local politics.

The price of a vote

Clark grew up poor in Spring Creek community, the eldest of eight children to a sharecropping tobacco farmer. They lived in a three-room shack where snow would blow through the cracks and electricity didn't arrive until Clark turned 17.

"We had nothing, absolutely nothing."

He came from what passes for a mixed marriage in Madison County, since his mother was a registered Democrat and his father a Republican.

"As a child, I remember the Democrats would come pay my mother a dollar for her vote, and the Republicans would pay my father a dollar. It was serious business."

His Uncle Bill in Middle Fork worked for the Ponder political machine, overseeing the local precinct.

The uncle explained that for an election, operatives delivered two ballot boxes to precincts. One box was empty, the other box already stuffed with marked ballots.

The box was delivered later to the courthouse, where operatives lay their guns on the table and counted up how the election should go, Clark said.

Zeno Ponder as much as admitted his scope of power in a 1974 oral history. An old classmate sidled up to him at a basketball game, he told the historian.

"Zeno, I worry about you," she said, "My God, you've got the power of life or death in Madison County."

Ponder said, "Hush, you're wrong. I don't sit on the bench; I don't pass sentences on anybody."

"Yes, but your influence — it's terrific."

A talk with the sheriff

Clark's own career path into local business would soon cross the Ponders' path.

He had made his way from Spring Creek to Western Carolina Teacher's College, and later served in human resources for state government under six administrations, both Democratic and Republican.

But Clark dreamed of having his own business, which brought him back home in 1981.

He saw a chance to buy the Walnut Cash and Carry, a country store that offered everything from woodstoves to plow points, local meats and molasses, to hardware and dried goods.

Locals traded plenty of stories around the pot-bellied stove about local politics and of course the Ponders.

Clark drove into downtown Marshall. "I went by the jail to talk to the sheriff, ask his opinion if it was a good purchase."

E.Y. Ponder gave Clark his blessing.

But Clark said that politics took precedence over good business and even protection under the law.

A group of unemployed young men, all supporters of the sheriff at election time, had been hanging around the store, swiping crackers, Vienna sausages, cans of sardines, whenever Clark or his employees weren't looking.

Clark had learned from the previous owner "that they had about robbed him blind."

He had taken to carrying a .357 handgun on his hip to dissuade shoplifting.

One night a deputy stepped inside and told Clark the sheriff was waiting out in the patrol car. He wanted to have a word.

"Son, you've been having a lot of problems, and I want to talk to you in a serious way. Let's you and me go for a drive," the sheriff told Clark.

"Those boys get hungry," the sheriff said up the road. "They don't mean your business any harm, so you'll just need to account for it."

Clark listened to the older man. "Is that all you have to say, sheriff?"

"Yeah, what's your answer?"

"I hate to say it, sheriff, but you know how I was brought up. We were taught you don't steal."

"Son, they're going to burn you out if you don't let them take a little."

Clark recalled, "I knew I couldn't depend on him after that."

A month after the sheriff's late night visit, he got a phone call about a huge fire in his parking lot, where straw bales had been dumped and set ablaze. His windows were shot out and there were break-ins.

By Halloween, Clark was ready for the troublemakers. He took his guns up to the cemetery overlooking his store and sat down between a couple of oak trees to wait. Along about 10 p.m., cars pulled into his parking lot and men stepped out in the dark.

Clark took aim from the cemetery and fired. "I took out the rear end of a Buick. It was neat to see them all scatter."

One of the men was so brazen as to drop by the next day, demanding damages for his Buick. "R.L., you don't know how close you came to killing me. That was my car you hit."

"Next time I'll get you with a bullet through your head," Clark warned. "That about stopped all the nonsense."

End of an era

Into the 1980s, the Ponders were a feared political machine whose reputation reached from Madison County into Raleigh, Clark said. Even Sen. Jesse Helms feared the Ponders' influence could tip the vote to former Gov. Jim Hunt in the 1984 Senate race.

By 1986, U.S. marshal Max Wilson and FBI agents were setting up shop in Clark's store to keep an eye on the election that would topple E.Y. from power.

Clark got into politics a few years later. In Buncombe County, he had purchased a successful G convenience store out on Leicester Highway for $400,000 in the early 1990s, but his business became a victim of highway widening through eminent domain.

Clark got so mad he decided to run for state Senate — in essentially the same district that Zeno Ponder had once tried to win.

In a Republican wave, Clark rode to power in Raleigh. He became known as "Senator No," voting against most measures that would increase governmental power.

"Every rule and regulation enacted on a business, they don't pay that. They pass it on down the rung," Clark said.

Clark said his old store once bartered for local meat, honey, molasses, eggs, milk and vegetables.

"One by one, government regulations stopped all those. It put a real hardship on country people with just a small plot of land and few chickens."

The farm-to-table movement is bringing back some of those local provisions, "but I don't see it coming all the way back."

Clark has been on the ballot through much of the past 20 years as a senate candidate. "If I didn't get elected, at least I could still get the issues out." But now at age 83, he's run his last campaign.

Politics remains a hardball game, but at least elections aren't rigged like they once were in Madison County and in many Western North Carolina counties, according to the former senator.

"At least, we've made some progress. Elections are a lot fairer in Madison County than they used to be." He nodded at the old wooden box, a relic of a crooked time when votes went for a dollar and results were tabulated with guns on the table.