Southern Exposure

The night of Jan. 14, when Georgia's legislature met to elect a successor to Governor Gene Talmadge, son Herman's chances were slim. In the first count of write-in ballots, he was running third among the contenders, and the new governor was to be chosen from the top two. Then, suddenly, 58 new votes--all from Talmadge's home county of Telfair--put Hummon back into the running. Ever since then, thoughtful Georgians have been wondering about those 58 votes. Last week they found out. After a month of cloak-&-dagger sleuthing, the Atlanta Journal splashed a well-documented story of forged ballots across Page One. It was one of the year's notable journalistic exploits.

It began with a politician's quiet tip to the Journal's veteran political editor, Earl Gregory. The Telfair ballots, he said, had been fixed. The Journal sent a young reporter named George Goodwin down to Telfair. He made the mistake of telling someone that he was from an Atlanta paper. County officials ducked him, or gave him vague answers. Disheartened, he returned to Atlanta without a story. Then he began digging in the State Secretary's office. In the bottom of a carton full of election-return envelopes, he came across the list of voters from Helena precinct in Telfair. The list looked fishy: the last 34 names were all in alphabetical order, from A through K. Goodwin reasoned that people just don't arrive at the polls in alphabetical order. He went back to Telfair, spent a day driving up back-country roads, seeking the 34 voters. Reporter Goodwin's findings: at least two of the 34 had been dead for years, five had long since moved from the county, five were willing to testify that they had not voted, and more than a dozen could not be found.

Hydrophobia, He Says. The Journal broke its story four days before the state Supreme Court began its hearings on the electoral mess. Hummon squawked loudly: "The Journal has running hydrophobia." His weekly paper, the Statesman ("The People: Editor; Herman Talmadge: Associate Editor"), joined in: "Smear tactics ... to coerce and intimidate the Supreme Court." Hundreds of congratulatory letters poured in to the Journal (owned by the Democrats' 1920 presidential candidate, James M. Cox). The rival Constitution, which fought Gene Talmadge in the last election, was strangely noncommittal about the Journal's expose of Hummon. Editor Ralph McGill (whom capitol wiseacres were now calling "the editor dimly seen") blamed the Telfair irregularities not on Hummon but upon "the carelessness generated by the one-party system."

Last week, as the state Supreme Court deliberated, the Journal diplomatically kept mum lest it be accused of trying to influence the Court. But the Journal's two G-men, Goodwin and Gregory, were still digging. They had received tips of vote-fixing in Cherokee County (55 votes had been added after the returns reached Atlanta). And they were poking around in Rockingham precinct (one of the two precincts in the state which gave Hummon, a write-in candidate, more votes than the regular Democratic nominee, ol' Gene). The Journal's Managing Editor William Kirkpatrick contentedly indicated that he still had a few more firecrackers to shoot off.

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