Postcards
One man, one vote. We don’t think this is what our forefathers meant. One voter elected every member of the Loretto, Ky., town council, according to State Legislatures magazine. The voter, who was stationed at an Illinois air force base, sent in an absentee ballot, on which he wrote in his mother, uncle and two friends for the council’s four seats. Since no one else was on the ballot, they were all elected. A 1992 constitutional amendment had been misunderstood, and no one bothered to mount a campaign, assuming there was no council election. One of the four winners accepted the position.
It was just one of those freaky coincidences. Atlanta City Councilwoman Sheila Martin Brown (who may well be former Atlanta City Councilwoman Sheila Martin Brown by the time this hits print) is under attack for trading the free Braves and Hawks tickets that she used to receive (before the Atlanta Journal and Constitution raised a ruckus) to a professional ticket broker in exchange for “favors.” Some of Brown’s tickets went to a cellular phone company and some to a local mortgage company. Brown says the favors she received – which included a cellular phone and $3,000 toward a trip from the same mortgage company – had nothing to do with the tickets and that the resulting publicity was actually good for her campaign.
But, I didn’t inhale . . . Tonya Dillard was upset with the drug traffic in her Bossier City, La., neighborhood, so she sought help from Police Chief Danny Dison. A month later, Dillard was arrested after a SWAT team sweep turned up marijuana in her house. “Yes, I went to get help to clean up my neighborhood,” she was quoted as saying in an Associated Press brief. “But what I do in the privacy of my house is my business.”
Roberto Alomar redux. Brier, Wash., City Councilman Ed Walker didn’t like the fact that his next-door neighbors were putting up a yard sign for one of his political enemies. An argument ensued, and, according to the neighbor, Walker, whose wife is the town mayor, spit on his next-door neighbor’s wife. Walker says the spitter was actually a tree that dropped sap on the woman’s dress. “We’ve got him dead to rights,” said the neighbor. “All we need is a sample of his spit.”