Election Limbo Days 32 & 33- Tribal Council

How have we gone this long
without a Survivor reference?

We haven’t done much analysis of the council races, but things will be different after August 14.   Half the council seats (8) were up for election.  As far as incumbents go, one council member, Janelle Fullbright, did not draw an opponent and is back on the council for four more years.  One, Chris Soap, chose to run for Deputy Chief instead.  Tina Glory Jordan, Bradley Cobb, Cara Cowan-Watts, and Julia Coates each had opponents.  Cobb was the only incumbent who lost, in a new district.  Finally, one race pitted two council members against each other, Jodie Fishinghawk and Harley Buzzard.  Fishinghawk won that one.

Two new seats were created, and they were won by Lee Keener and David Walkingstick.

So the new council looks like this:

District One (Cherokee and Wagoner County):  Tina Glory Jordan, David Walkingstick and Bill John Baker (for a few more weeks or two more years).

District Two (Adair, Delaware and Ottawa County): Jodie Fishinghawk, Curtis Snell and an open seat that will be vacated by Joe Crittenden on August 14 when he is sworn in as the Deputy Chief

District Three (Muskogee, McIntosh, Sequoyah Counties): Don Garvin, Janelle Fullbright, David Thornton

District Four (Mayes, Craig, Nowata, Craig, Washington County): Dick Lay, Chuck Hoskin, Jr., Meredith Frailey.

District Five: (Tulsa and Washington Counties):  Buel Anglen, Cara Cowan-Watts, Lee Keener

At-Large:  Julia Coates and Jack Baker

The short version is that Cobb, Soap, Crittenden and Buzzard are going to be off the council, replaced by Lay, Keener, Walkingstick and whoever replaces Crittenden on the council.  Since Cobb, Soap and Buzzard were generally pretty friendly to Smith, he’s going to have a less friendly council to work with if he gets re-elected.  Baker, if he’s elected, will have more friends on the council than he does now.  Depending on how it shakes out in the council races, he might pick up a couple of more friends.

Since a chief has to work with the council to get his initiatives passed, these will be important things to think about moving ahead.

Election Limbo Day 8: The "Resounding Loser"

The Muskogee Phoenix deserves a shout-out for their latest story on the election, especially the first line:

“Two winners were declared this week in the contest to elect the Cherokee Nation’s principal chief. But the resounding loser appears to be the tribe’s election commission.”

Both sides have had problems with the commission, and no one seems to know for sure what the real vote was at this point.  When Smith was ahead, he thought it was fair to have a recount and Baker thought the commission was ‘stealing’ the election from him.  But when Baker went ahead on the recount, which the commission admits was screwed up, he suddenly thought they were a-ok and  reliable. 

So who are these people and how did they get there?  As some of our readers point out, the Cherokee Nation web site has some good information on the commission. 

They are not, as Mr. Hoskin has said in statements, Smith’s ‘hand picked’ election commission:  Hoskin and Baker voted in favor of the two commissioners selected by the council. The commissioners are:  Roger Johnson and Martha Calico, both of whom were selected unanimously, (including votes from Baker and his spokesperson/fellow council member Chuck Hoskin, Jr.).  Resolutions 07-08 and 08-08 on legistar show those votes.  Chief Smith also selected two people, Patsy Eads-Morton and Curtis Rohr.  Together, those four selected Brenda Walker.  Johnson, one of the council’s selections, is the Chairman of the commission.  So even though both sides seem to have no confidence in the commission, it’s true that both sides had an equal say in assembling the people who have created the mess.

One bit of truth that has gone unnoticed so far:  either candidate could have avoided any of this mess by getting, say, 500 more votes than the other thus making the margin large enough that the rest of these things would seem irrelevant.  However, with such a close election and such a mess made by the election commission, neither candidate has a mandate or the right to invoke the strong will of the Cherokee people.