Oklahoma Election 2026 Category

Screenshot from a December 14, 2021, "Community Conversation" from Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform.

It's pretty cowardly to attack someone on social media with false claims, block the target from seeing or responding to the attack, and include a misleading half-quote from a post without linking to it. But that's Colleen McCarty, who wants to Republican voters to elect her as Tulsa County District Attorney.

Here's what I wrote, the final paragraph of my article about her participation in a protest against a personhood bill. She quoted the last clause (in bold), without the conditional clause, and accused me of attacking her child and thus violating a principle of campaign decency.

But note that Colleen McCarty's signs say nothing about IVF. They exalt her desires above the interests of her unborn child: "WHAT'S BEST FOR ME IS WHAT'S BEST FOR MY BABY." Her T-shirt declares that she should have life-and-death authority over her unborn child, who is merely "A CHOICE": If McCarty chooses one way, that belly bump is a baby, but if McCarty chooses the other way, her unborn child is just biohazard waste to be dismembered, extracted, and either incinerated or sold for parts.

The point, clear enough when quoted in full, is that McCarty's daughter was made in the image of God and endowed by her Creator with certain unalienable rights, and those rights aren't dependent on Colleen McCarty's decision. She was always a child, never just "A CHOICE." The personhood bill was designed to acknowledge and protect the unalienable rights of the unborn; Colleen McCarty's protest sign said "NO TO PERSONHOOD."

(I would link to the attack, but I'm blocked from her Facebook campaign page, so I can't get to it.)

She also claims, falsely, that I paid for an ad in Urban Tulsa Weekly to print a retraction because I couldn't afford an ad in the Tulsa World. The only newspaper ad I ever bought was a Whirled ad when I ran for City Council in 1998; the ad was a waste of money. (Or maybe I just thought about it and decided it would be a waste of money.)

In my 23 years of writing, I've been sued once, over a newspaper column. I posted a retraction (for free) on my website, and the suit was dismissed. I am told that McCarty claims I was utterly disgraced by this one lawsuit in 23 years of writing.

Prior to passage of the Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act in 2014, defending against a SLAPP lawsuit was a costly battle where "the process is the punishment." A defendant, even in the right, would be inclined to settle rather than risk months or years of costly litigation, particularly against a deep-pocketed corporate plaintiff. The Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act, our anti-SLAPP law, was passed unanimously and signed into law in 2014. State Rep. John Trebilcock authored the bill on my suggestion, modeling it after a robust Texas statute.

If you've read this website for any length of time, you know how careful I am to provide links and backup for everything. One of the benefits of a website over print and over many social media platforms is the ability to use as many hyperlinks as needed to provide references for a story. I do my best to be fair and accurate, but readers can click the links and judge for themselves whether or not I've fairly characterized the information. You can be Bereans and "see whether these things are so."

I've gotten grief over the years for being too wordy, too nuanced, and for taking too long to get something published. I see other writers happy to dash something off without doing the research and send it to their mailing lists, only to have to backtrack. I see people using sensationalistic and misleading language, putting quotation marks around paraphrases. That's not my way.

When I began writing this series on Colleen McCarty, documenting aspects of her past that should alarm a conservative Republican primary voter, the initial response, mainly through her supporters online, was post-hoc rationalization. If you're a parent, you'll be familiar with this strategy: When Mom and Dad finds out you did something unacceptable, the kid comes up with a plausible explanation that makes the facts seem less outrageous. Ideally, it's an explanation that isn't easy to disprove, one with no paper trail that might contradict it.

So we were told that her law journal papers and Twitter threads and press releases and commercials weren't really her opinion; she was just a worker bee (with titles like Founding Executive Director, Policy Counsel, and Deputy Director) following the Board of Directors' orders. We were told that she only donated to Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign to try to stop corrupt Hillary Clinton, not because she liked his radical policies. Why, she wasn't even a Democrat in 2016, we were told. (In fact, she was a registered Democrat from 2007 to 2024.) She didn't attend the anti-personhood rally, it's claimed, because she's pro-choice (even though "A CHOICE" was written on a T-shirt covering her unborn child) but because of IVF (even though it wasn't mentioned on her T-shirt or the poster she was carrying).

I was told that if I would only meet with her, she could convince me of her alibis, but I find a candidate's documented and public statements more credible than what he or she may tell me privately in pursuit of my vote.

It appears that the alibis and rationalizations have fallen flat with the voters, so now she's trying to shoot one of the messengers. It won't work. The evidence is all there for anyone to read -- links to articles and videos still available on the live web and captured by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Many other Tulsans have been independently digging through McCarty's record and posting their finds, X users like attorney Kevin Adams, Joan Lee Pettimore, Snarkio, and OklaHombre. They've covered things I haven't gotten to (yet), like McCarty's name on an Oklahoma Appleseed Center / Oklahoma Equality Law Center lawsuit against Ryan Walters and the State Board of Education, attacking rules that require schools to use a child's name and birth sex in school records, instead of trans-name and trans-gender. Kevin Adams found this quote from McCarty in an Oklahoma Appleseed Center press release about the suit:

"Walters and the State Board have repeatedly denied the existence of transgender students, insisting their genders are merely a fabrication of the 'woke left'," said McCarty. "This signaling from the board makes it clear their intent is gender discrimination against our client under Title IX which is supposed to prevent schools and educational bodies from discriminating on the basis of gender."

There's plenty of other material out there, and you can do your part in helping to educate your neighbors and friends. Instead of linking to me when you post on social media, link directly to the original material and make your own comments. Instead of standing behind one person that she can isolate and attack, Rules for Radicals-style, stand together as a swarm of truth-tellers that she can't stop.

Colleen McCarty's entire campaign is built on deceptive language and misleading words. We can't put someone like that in control of local prosecution.

PREVIOUS ARTICLES on Colleen McCarty:

• Colleen McCarty's short, progressive, soft-on-crime resume
• Colleen McCarty's kind of justice: Putting the criminal first
• Colleen McCarty: Multiple thefts shouldn't be a felony
• Colleen McCarty protests personhood of the unborn
• Colleen McCarty: Democrat for nearly 17 years, Republican for 1.7 years

Don't urinate on my leg and tell me it's raining.

I like Mike Mazzei. He seems to have the best platform and the most credible conservative credentials of the four candidates actually working* to win the governorship. He seems to be the only one of the four who won't roll over for tribal apartheid and who will fight for one system of justice for all Oklahomans.

But there's a problem with what he's saying about his vote for the National Popular Vote Compact in 2014. He really did vote for SB 906, and SB 906 was a law that would commit Oklahoma to the National Popular Vote Compact, giving Oklahoma's electoral votes to whomever was deemed the presidential candidate with a plurality of popular votes nationwide. It wasn't a vote to conduct a study. It was signing Oklahoma up to be the first Red State to join a long list of liberal states to be an NPV state. NPV would go into effect as soon as states with at least 270 electoral votes had agreed to the compact, and while Oklahoma's 7 votes wouldn't have been the tipping point, the precedent would have helped NPV lobbyists convince other conservative states to follow suit. That's why John Koza, Saul Anuzis, and their allies targeted Oklahoma.

The bill Mike Mazzei voted for would have gone into effect in November 2014. It would have been in effect in 2016. Oklahoma would have given its electoral votes to Hillary Clinton even though Donald Trump won every county.

18 Republicans had the good sense to vote against SB 906. 16 Republicans, including Mazzei, made the wrong vote, along with all the Democrats. (That should have been a clue.) After the outcry following the vote, some conservative State Senators, including Gary Stanislawski, Josh Brecheen, and Mark Allen, publicly recanted their vote for NPV and apologized to their constituents, although some conservative activists said that these senators had been warned and should have known better.

The general tone of the excuses from Republicans who voted for the NPV Compact is that lobbyists made legislators angry thinking about how presidential candidates take solid-red states Oklahoma for granted while wooing swing states. Some of them got so angry that they'd pledged to vote for the bill and did out of a sense of moral obligation, even after they realized it was a bad idea.

This is what Mike Mazzei is saying online about his vote for SB 906, with my comments in brackets:

Let's put this issue to rest once and for all. [Being straightforward and honest about voting the wrong way is the only way that will happen.]

I do not support the national popular vote and I never have. [You voted for Oklahoma to participate in it, to allocate our electoral votes to the national popular vote winner.]

I will always back the electoral college because the Founding Fathers had it right. [In 2014, you voted to bypass the electoral college.]

The electoral college gives smaller, less populated states - like Oklahoma - a more balanced representation in the federal government. [This is true, one of many important reasons not to vote to join the NPV Compact.]

As far as that bill from 15 years ago that went nowhere, it's a silly non-issue. [The bill was only 12 years ago, and it passed the Senate.]

They tried pulling this stunt against Congressman Josh Brecheen a few years ago. Voters saw through it then, and they see through it now. [Brecheen had the good sense to recant and apologize shortly after the vote. He seems to have learned his lesson.]

First of all, there was nothing in the bill about abolishing the electoral college. [Technically true -- that would require a constitutional amendment -- but misleading. The bill was about working around the electoral college to elect presidents by popular vote without technically abolishing the electoral college.]

Second, our understanding of the bill at the time was that it was a study to determine the best ways to drive out the Christian conservative vote. [This makes no sense. Here is the text of the bill, the "Engrossed" version as approved by the State Senate. The word "study" occurs nowhere. The full text of the bill, only six pages of double-spaced type, is appended at the end of this entry. It's like he didn't even read it before agreeing to vote for it.]

Once we realized it was a bit more than that, we quickly and effectively quashed it before it even got to the House. [It was grassroots conservatives who raised a stink and convinced the House not to touch SB 906. I don't recall Mike Mazzei speaking out, and I can't find any record that he did.]

If this non-issue is the best attack my opponents can come up with, good luck to them. [Voting for NPV is an issue. They don't need luck with this kind of own-goal.]

Oklahomans want the income tax eliminated, no property taxes for seniors and veterans, and students reading at grade level. [We also want the electoral vote system protected, not bypassed.]

We all want a prosperous future for our kids and grandkids. [Electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 would not have helped.]

NOTE: *If Jake Merrick were actually working to win the governorship, instead of being on a lark, he'd have been able to build a big enough number of grassroots supporters who would give him enough in small donations to reach potential primary voters.

Former State Sen. Mike Mazzei narrowly leads the race for the Republican nomination for Governor of Oklahoma in a new poll commissioned by NonDoc. The top three candidates, Mike Mazzei, Gentner Drummond, and Chip Keating, are within one percentage point of each other. Charles McCall in 4th place is less than 3 points behind 1st place.

1. Mike Mazzei, 22.10%
2. Gentner Drummond, 21.66%
3. Chip Keating, 21.44%
4. Charles McCall, 18.38%
5. Jake Merrick, 7.21%
6. Kenneth Sturgell, 3.06%
7. Jennifer Domenico, 2.63%
8. Leisa Mitchell Haynes, 2.41%
9. Callup Anthony Taylor, 1.09%

The last previous public poll of the GOP Governor primary was released by CHS in early February, and it showed Drummond with more than double the support of his nearest challenger at 35% and McCall at 14%, Mazzei at 13%, and Keating at 13%, within a percentage point of each other. Merrick had 5% in that poll.

The poll will be used to determine who will qualify to participate in NonDoc's gubernatorial debate on Thursday, May 28, 2026. A 12% threshold is required to participate.

NonDoc wrote that they spent their own money on the poll in order to give them a fair basis to decide who made the cut, rather than basing the decision of four-month old polling numbers. "With no public gubernatorial polling since January, how would we know whether Merrick, Leisa Mitchell Haynes, Kenneth Sturgell, Jennifer Domenico or Callup Anthony Taylor had closed their gap with the top four candidates?" Merrick has intense and vocal support online, but that hasn't translated to a realistic chance of advancing to the runoff.

The debate will be held at Cameron University in Lawton and will be broadcast live on KSWO and C-SPAN and will be streamed on KSWO.com and CSPAN.org, starting at 5:45 p.m. on Thursday, May 28, 2026.

The poll also asked about the Republican primary for State Superintendent. Nearly half of those polled were undecided, but John Cox leads with 12.25%, followed by State Sen. Adam Pugh with 7.66%, but other candidates are not far behind. CHS also recently polled this race and found 61% undecided and all candidates in single digits, with John Cox at 9% and Adam Pugh at 8%. Six of the seven candidates will participate in the June 2 NonDoc debate.

RELATED: The 2026 1Q campaign contributions and expenditures reports showed the leading four candidates had raised over $4 million each. Jake Merrick had raised only $34,092.49. That's barely more than the $30,066.34 Merrick raised before the primary in his 2022 quest for a full term in the State Senate, a primary that he lost. (Merrick's campaign for Governor also reported another $13,873.83, in in-kind contributions, such as a month's use of an RV.)

For comparison, in 2018, grassroots favorite Dan Fisher had raised $223,885.68 by the end of the first quarter, $198,885.68 from individual contributions, and nearly half of that in Q1. Between the end of Q1 and the primary, Fisher raised another $95,425. Fisher's fundraising arguably showed momentum, but nevertheless Fisher finished 4th in the Republican primary with 8% of the vote. The 2nd and 3rd place candidates, Kevin Stitt and Todd Lamb, were so close in votes that either might have made the runoff had Fisher or a couple of other candidates with devoted followings (Gary Jones, Gary Richardson) dropped out.

For all of Fisher's fundraising and devoted online support, he managed only a poor fourth. What can Merrick expect with far worse fundraising, with barely more money than he had for a losing State Senate race?

This is a year of open seats in Oklahoma. Statewide incumbents are either term-limited or seeking higher offices. Some races have drawn nearly a dozen candidates. The likelihood is that most of these races will result in a two-candidate runoff. The question is whether conservatives will have someone worth voting for in that runoff.

I've written before about the hazards of a two-candidate runoff. In the 1991 Louisiana governor's race, several reasonable candidates split the reasonable vote, and the runoff was between corrupt former Governor Edwin Edwards and former KKK leader David Duke -- crook vs. klansman. A candidate receiving 5.3% of the vote drew well enough to keep incumbent Buddy Roemer from making the runoff. There was a popular bumper sticker that said, "Vote for the Crook. It's important." If reasonable voters had rallied behind Roemer, Louisiana could have avoided that dilemma.

We had the same problem in the Tulsa Mayor's race in 2024: There were several Republican candidates, plus a Democrat with a moderate image who downplayed her party affiliation. With no party labels on the ballot to provide a frame of reference, Republican voters were split, and two Democrats advanced to the runoff, leaving Republicans with no good option.

There are also no labels next to candidate names on the Republican primary ballot, nothing to separate real conservatives from phony conservatives, real Republicans from RINOs. Without guidance, without some sort of conservative "primary" before the primary, it's likely that conservative voters will vote for phonies or split their votes between real conservatives, allowing the phonies to advance to the runoff, leaving conservatives with no good option.

Out of the nine Republican candidates for Governor of Oklahoma, the two that got the earliest start and have been at or near the top of the fundraising race are the two I'd least want to see win the office. I was asked a couple of months ago by a phone pollster what I'd do if there were a runoff between Attorney General Gentner Drummond and former Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall. My response was one of despair.

Before we get to the question of which candidate conservatives should unite behind, I need to explain why a Drummond/McCall runoff would be such a tragic result, why we need to unite behind one conservative candidate, why we can't just vote for our favorite in the primary and hope for good choices in the runoff. There is a bad outcome for the Governor's primary, and right now it looks like the most likely outcome.

So to begin, here's an attempt to gather into one place some of the many reasons why conservatives don't want Gentner Drummond to be Governor. Drummond has been trying to pose as a conservative for years, and with the help of massive dark money spending aimed to help him, he succeeded in fooling just enough 2022 Republican primary voters to defeat incumbent Attorney General John O'Connor (an actual conservative). Gentner Drummond has repeatedly displayed his true colors in his political contributions to support liberal Democrats and Democrat control of Congress, in his support for the dual system of justice and legal confusion created by the McGirt ruling, in his antagonism toward religious liberty and religious expression, and in his frequent hostile actions toward Gov. Stitt and other conservative elected officials.

I have to start by giving a tip of the hat and the strongest possible recommendation to read the work of Jamison Faught, the Muskogee Politico, who has been keeping a consistent eye on Drummond since his first statewide campaign. Last summer, as the Governor's race started heating up, he recapped his coverage in "Who is the real Gentner Drummond?"

Gentner Drummond has a long history of giving to Democrats, even in crucial elections when one seat could determine control of the U. S. Senate and the U. S. House. Drummond was a major contributor ($1,000) to Democrat Brad Carson's 2004 run for U. S. Senate (he lost to Tom Coburn) and Democrat Dan Boren's campaigns ($2,500) for U. S. House. However "moderate" those two candidates may have been, Drummond's support for their candidacies was support for Democrat majorities in Washington and for leftist Democrats like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to run the committees and set the legislative agenda.

On August 31, 2020, Gentner Drummond gave $1,000 to Joe Biden's general election campaign for President against Donald Trump. During the 2022 AG race, Drummond claimed that his wife Wendy "got mad" and used a joint credit card to give the $1,000 to Biden, but that she "immediately asked for a refund and got the money back."

Steve Kunzweiler, the incumbent Tulsa County District Attorney, has been recognized as a Certified Republican by the Oklahoma Republican Party. This means he's been a registered Republican voter for at least five years, has not contributed to a Democrat candidate within five years, and is in agreement with at least 80% of the Oklahoma Republican platform, does not support abortion, and is pro-Second Amendment. The designation is offered by the state party to help voters discern between candidates who genuinely share their values and politicians who have opportunistically adopted the GOP label in order to get elected in this very Republican state.

His opponent, the newly registered Republican Colleen McCarty, has said that the five-year voter registration requirement is the only one keeping her for being a certified Republican (despite her history of participating in a pro-abortion rally). She says that she'll meet that required if she's elected DA by the time she runs for re-election in 2030. She's even claimed that by that time she'll have been a Republican for as long as she was ever a Democrat.

That's not true, Colleen.

According to official information from the Tulsa County Election Board, here are Colleen Lilah McCarty's party affiliations over time:

• February 4, 2004: registered as an independent (1,343 days)
• October 9, 2007: changed to Democrat (6,192 days)
• September 21, 2024: changed to Republican (609 days)

So as of today, Colleen McCarty has been a Democrat 10 times longer than she's been a Republican. She was a Democrat for 16.964 years; she's been a Republican for 20 months. If she stays Republican, it won't be until September 4, 2041, that she'll have been a Republican as long as she was a Democrat. That's 15 years from now.

Maybe Colleen McCarty forgot. Or maybe she just thought that no one would be able to fact-check her on something that happened so long ago.

Colleen McCarty, the Democrat-turned-Republican candidate for Tulsa County District Attorney, was a prominent participant in a 2012 rally organized by pro-abortion forces. McCarty appears front-and-center wearing a pink T-shirt with the words "A CHOICE" printed in large letters across her belly. McCarty is holding a sign that reads "WHAT'S BEST FOR ME IS WHAT'S BEST FOR MY BABY. NO TO PERSONHOOD!"

The Daily Oklahoman covered the rally with a news story (current link here) and a video story.

The Oklahoman's news story featured a grinning Sen. Judy Eason McIntyre carrying a sign reading "IF I WANTED THE GOVERNMENT IN MY WOMB I'D F[***] A SENATOR."

Other signs at the rally: "Keep abortion safe and legal." "Keep your laws out of my womb." "If the fetus you safe is gay will you still fight for its rights?" "Forcing your agenda between my legs." "My body my choice."

McCarty appears in an Associated Press photograph, available on the Deseret News website, with the caption: "Colleen McCarty, Tulsa, Okla., cheers at an anti-personhood rally at the state Capitol in Oklahoma City, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012. The rally is in opposition to the state Senate's passage of a bill that grants the rights of personhood to fertilized human [eggs]. Susan Ogrocki, [Associated Press]."

She is quoted in the AP story:

Colleen McCarty, 26, a consultant and restaurant owner from Tulsa, said she would strongly consider taking her two businesses out of the state if the bill moves forward.

Six months pregnant and wearing a T-shirt with the words "a choice" printed over her belly, McCarty said she would not raise her daughter in a state where she would not have control over her medical decisions.

Some context: This was before the Dobbs decision. Roe v. Wade had not yet been overturned, but in the Casey decision the U. S. Supreme Court gave states leeway to place some restrictions on abortion, and pro-life legislators worked around the margins, short of a direct challenge to Roe, to gain ground for unborn children. The Personhood bill was one such effort. SB 1433, authored by Sen. Brian Crain, made the following legislative findings: "1. The life of each human being begins at conception; 2. Unborn children have protectable interests in life, health, and well-being; and 3. The natural parents of unborn children have protectable interests in the life, health, and well-being of their unborn child." The bill would have "The laws of this state shall be interpreted and construed to acknowledge on behalf of the unborn child at every stage of development all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state." The bill passed the State Senate by a wide margin, was favorably voted out of the House Committee, but it did not get a floor vote in the House. (Kris Steele, who later led the anti-prison group Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform, was Speaker of the House at that time. McCarty was later Deputy Director of OCJR, working for Steele.)

Pro-abortion forces rightly saw this as a threat to their ability to kill unborn children and rallied to stop it. If an unborn child has the same rights as any other human, is considered a person under law, then it's as illegal to kill that child as it is to kill a toddler or a teenager. They attempted to get support from people outside the pro-abortion movement by claiming the bill was a threat to women who miscarried and a threat to in-vitro fertilization, but the bill had language addressing those concerns. McCarty is now claiming, through her social media apologists, like Broken Arrow Mayor Debra Wimpee and State Sen. Dana Prieto, that the bill was only about IVF or that IVF was why she was at the protest. (How McCarty has managed to hoodwink a number of conservatives is a subject for a later article.)

But note that Colleen McCarty's signs say nothing about IVF. They exalt her desires above the interests of her unborn child: "WHAT'S BEST FOR ME IS WHAT'S BEST FOR MY BABY." Her T-shirt declares that she should have life-and-death authority over her unborn child, who is merely "A CHOICE": If McCarty chooses one way, that belly bump is a baby, but if McCarty chooses the other way, her unborn child is just biohazard waste to be dismembered, extracted, and either incinerated or sold for parts.

PREVIOUS ARTICLES on Colleen McCarty:

Colleen McCarty's short, progressive, soft-on-crime resume
Colleen McCarty's kind of justice: Putting the criminal first
Colleen McCarty: Multiple thefts shouldn't be a felony

This is an update of an entry from 16 years ago. The structure and offices are the same, but the names are different for 2026.

It took me a while to puzzle all this out, and I thought others might be interested as well.

Oklahoma has 26 District Courts. Tulsa County and Pawnee County constitute Judicial District No. 14. State law says that District 14 has 14 district judge offices. (Why are Tulsa County and Pawnee County coupled together? Why not Pawnee with, say, Osage, and Tulsa on its own, as Oklahoma County is? Why doesn't the Judicial District line up with the District Attorney District?)

One judge must reside in and be nominated from Pawnee County, eight must reside in and be nominated from Tulsa County. If there are more than two candidates for any of those nine offices, there is a non-partisan nominating primary in the appropriate county, and the top two vote-getters are on the general election ballot. (Even if one gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two still advance.)

In the general election, all voters in Pawnee and Tulsa Counties vote on those nine seats.

The remaining five district judges are selected by electoral division in Tulsa County. In order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, Tulsa County is divided into five electoral divisions, one of which (Electoral Division 3) has a "minority-majority" population. (The minority-majority district is much smaller than the other four, as it must be in order to guarantee that the electorate is majority African-American.) For each of these five offices, if there are three or more candidates, there is a non-partisan nominating primary. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, he is elected; otherwise, the top two advance to the general election. For each of these five offices, the candidates must reside in the corresponding electoral division, and only voters in that electoral division will vote for that office in the primary and general election. (Oklahoma County, Judicial District No. 7, is the only other county with judges elected by division.)

Despite the three different paths one can take to be elected, a Judge in Judicial District No. 14 can be assigned to try any case within the two counties.

Each county in the state also elects an Associate District Judge, nominated and elected countywide. Incumbent Tulsa County Associate District Judge Todd Chesbro has been re-elected without opposition. Pawnee County Associate District Judge Patrick Pickerill was re-elected without opposition.

In addition to the elected judges, the District has a certain number of Special Judges, who are appointed by and serve at the pleasure of the District Judges.

All this I was able to puzzle out from prior knowledge and browsing through the relevant sections of the Oklahoma Statutes. What I still couldn't quite figure out is which of the 14 offices corresponded with the five electoral divisions, and which one was nominated from Pawnee County. Although electoral division 4 votes for office 4, I was pretty sure the pattern did not apply to the other offices. Back in 2006, after a few phone calls, someone from the Tulsa County Election Board found the relevant info in the League of Women Voters handbook.

So here it is, for your reference and mine, with the party registration of each judge noted in parentheses. (Yes, I know Oklahoma judicial races are non-partisan and judicial candidates are supposed to refrain from mentioning party affiliation, but I'm not subject to that restriction, and party registration is a matter of public record. Party affiliation may be some indication of a candidate's judicial philosophy. Judges now have the option to have their voter registration "unlisted" for their personal security, and many have availed themselves of that option; I have question marks for those judges, which I will replace with better information if it becomes available.)

Offices elected by Tulsa County Electoral Divisions in red.
Offices nominated by Pawnee County in blue.

¹ Not seeking re-election.
² Appointed by Gov. Stitt to fill unexpired term of Jim Huber, who was appointed to the Court of Civil Appeals.

Although all 14 offices are up for election this year, only three offices are contested, and only one of those will be on the primary ballot.

Two incumbent judges have drawn opponents: Caroline Wall in Office 1 and Kevin Gray in Office 12. Wall is a registered Republican, being challenged by Tom Sawyer, a rematch of their 2018 contest. Gray is being challenged by Christopher Camp, also a registered Republican.

One of the two open seats, Office 4, currently held by Daman Cantrell (I), has drawn three candidates, Special Judge Loretta Radford, former prosecutor Dustin Allen, and Rogers County Assistant District Attorney Phillip Peak. This is the only one of the five offices elected by electoral division that is being contested this year. If any one candidate gets 50% or more of the primary vote, that candidate is elected, and there will not be a runoff in November.

The other open seat, Office 11, is currently held by Rebecca Brett Nightingale. Special Judge April Siebert was the only candidate to file for the seat, so she has been elected.

Judicial Election District 4 voters will be the only ones to have a judicial race on the ballot on June 16, 2026. In rough terms, the district includes all of Tulsa County north of 66th Street North (including Sperry, Skiatook, Collinsville, Owasso), nearly all of the the City of Tulsa in Tulsa County east of Memorial Drive and north of 61st Street.

The best way to know which electoral division you live in is to consult the Tulsa County judicial electoral division map. Click here for the full collection of Tulsa County district and precinct maps.

This past Saturday I was on Tulsa Beacon Weekend on KCFO AM 970 with Jeff Brucculeri mainly to talk about the upcoming June 16, 2026, primary election. We took a couple of digressions to talk about air travel (particularly the demise of Spirit Air) and AM radio's importance to the traveler. The Tulsa County DA's race was the main focus of the conversation. Next week, Jeff's guest is incumbent DA Steve Kunzweiler; Kunzweiler makes a couple of appearances on the show each year, and this appearance was scheduled months ago.

The hour-long interview show, sponsored by the weekly Tulsa Beacon newspaper, airs live each week at noon Saturday.

You can always find the latest episode of Tulsa Beacon Weekend at this link. I've made a Wayback Machine capture of last Saturday's episode at this permalink.

Until she started trying to convince Republican voters that she's a tough-on-crime conservative, Colleen McCarty frequently spoke out to protect career criminals from tougher laws.

In 2021, State Sen. Lonnie Paxton proposed SB 334. The bill would allow courts to aggregate multiple misdemeanor larcenies within a six-month period. The effect would be that if the total amount stolen within those six months reached a felony level, the perp could be charged with a felony, with the potential of felony penalties, instead of multiple misdemeanors. It would make it harder for someone to make a career of thefts just below the felony threshold.

In March 2021, Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform produced a one-minute video opposing SB 334.

When OCJR produced this video, this is the entirety of the change that would have been made to existing law:

B. When three or more separate offenses under this section are committed within a ninety-day one hundred eighty-day period, the value of the goods, edible meat or other corporeal property involved in each larceny offense may be aggregated to determine the total value for purposes of determining the appropriate punishment under this section.

Here is the text of the video:

Text on screen: WHY IS SENATE BILL 334 BAD FOR OKLAHOMA?

Colleen McCarty, OCJR Policy Counsel: If you think about where you were 6 months ago versus right now, totally different things were probably happening in your lives, different stressors, different uh considerations, different risks that you're assessing every day. In the context of SB 334, that's important to think about.

Text on screen: OKLAHOMA SENATE BILL 334 COMBINES AN OFFENDER'S MISDEMEANOR THEFT CHARGES OVER A SIX-MONTH PERIOD AND TURNS THEM INTO A FELONY

Colleen McCarty, OCJR Policy Counsel: It's important to remember that in America when you commit a crime, you get charged with that crime.

Text on screen: THE LEGISLATION SETS A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT FOR OKLAHOMANS AND DEFIES VOTERS BY ROLLING BACK REFORM

Colleen McCarty, OCJR Policy Counsel: The collateral consequences of of this are massive.

Text on screen, over a man in an orange suit in a jail cell: THE LAW WILL UNNECESSARILY CREATE MORE FELONS WHO RELY ON TAXPAYER DOLLARS AND BECOME DEPENDENT ON THE SYSTEM

Kris Steele, OCJR Executive Director: It makes no sense to spend literally $20,000 a year to incarcerate somebody who steals $1,000 worth of merchandise uh to either meet their basic needs or to feed an addiction.

While SB 334 passed both House and Senate with nearly identical language, some legislative technicalities kept it from going to the Governor's desk in 2021. The 180-day language was eventually passed and is current law: 21 O.S. § 1731

I am still scratching my head over what McCarty is trying to imply with her strange words. Is she saying it's understandable that you might just accidentally find yourself stealing again within a six-month window because of "different stressors, different considerations"? Note that the video mutes her during the second statement, and you have to assume that the muted words were even more incoherent. Consider that what you hear was the best of the material they had to work with. Terrifying.

I am befuddled even more by the postcard I received today of a handful of alleged conservatives endorsing McCarty. Watch the video three or four times and ask yourself, Do I want this inarticulate, ill-prepared, soft-headed liberal leading the fight against crime in Tulsa County?

Colleen McCarty, the long-time Democrat advocate for "criminal justice reform" and "alternatives to incarceration" who is running for Tulsa County District Attorney as a "Republican," used to have a fairly well-followed Twitter (now X) account. While she has deleted her Twitter account, a couple of threads of her tweets have survived thanks to ThreadReaderApp.

In reaction to my article on McCarty's short, progressive, soft-on-crime resume, her supporters have claimed that she can't be blamed for the initiatives she led and the position papers she wrote as Policy Counsel and Deputy Director of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform and as the Founding Executive Director at Oklahoma Appleseed Project for Law and Justice. They claim, implausibly, that these were just jobs, that she might not necessarily agree with the work of those organizations, that she was just following orders from the board.

What a ludicrous apologetic! As a law student, McCarty could have published articles on any number of legal subjects, but she chose to publish articles supporting SQ 780 and 781 and opposing the efforts of District Attorneys to mitigate the damage those sentence-reducing "criminal justice reform" initiatives did to law enforcement in Oklahoma. As a newly minted attorney, a wide range of fields of practice were open to her; she chose to work exclusively for organizations pushing to reduce incarceration rates -- to help criminals avoid the consequences of their crimes.

Any claims that these were merely jobs evaporate in light of what survives of her well-scrubbed social-media history. One of the surviving threads, McCarty's pitch in support of State Question 805, is clearly a heartfelt explanation of her personal motives driving her career and her personal philosophy of crime and punishment.

Below is a Colleen McCarty Twitter thread dated October 17, 2020. SQ 805 was on the November 2020 ballot. It was a constitutional amendment to eliminate sentence enhancements for a convicted criminal's prior crimes. In other words, prosecutors would not be able to seek, and judges and juries would not be able to impose, tougher sentences on repeat offenders. Happily, Oklahoma voters defeated SQ 805, with 61% voting no.

SQ 805 was heavily backed by national left-wing groups like FWD.us and the ACLU, who contributed a combined $6.3 million to its passage, and by local liberal Democrat leaders like former Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor, former Governor Brad Henry, and disgraced former Governor David Walters. Conservative leaders like Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell, victims of violence, law enforcement, and prosecutors united to oppose SQ 805.

Former Gov. Frank Keating, writing in opposition to SQ 805, called it "the ultimate gift to the career criminal and the insect crime wave of the lifetime repeat offender." Keating noted that under SQ 805, if you repeatedly commit one of many "very serious and dangerous" criminal acts, such as drunk driving and causing injury, child trafficking, incest, hate crimes, stalking and violation of protective orders, and drug distribution, "a second offense remains a first offense for punishment. No matter how many times you offend. There is no 'enhancement' permitted. 'After Former Conviction of a Felony' will become a useless phrase. A person's selfish and destructive long life of crime will be handled as one first offense after another. The fifteenth offense is the first offense as far as punishment goes.... How many times can a criminal do these? As many as they wish. Each time, they will be treated as a first offender."

In this thread, Colleen McCarty calls for passage of SQ 805, implying, in a statement with racist overtones, that "citizens of color" are more likely to be repeat offenders:

Voting Yes on 805 means doing justice. We are eliminating enhancements on nonviolent crimes which reflects the enhancements systems in other states and brings OK's sentencing into the modern age. To continue to participate and architect a system that perpetuates cycles of harm on citizens of color and low income communities is not doing justice. It is immoral and cruel.

Colleen McCarty reveals what drove her career choices in the thread. Her initial desire to be a prosecutor was "inspired by @adamjohnfoss and his work around restorative justice" and cites an example of putting a thief "on a plan" instead of taking him to trial. "This type of justice was what I was interested in as a legal intern in the DA's office." [According to her LinkedIn profile, McCarty's DA office internships lasted two months in Tulsa County and one month in Wagoner County.]

McCarty's use of the term "justice" is typical of the left. She confuses justice with mercy when she writes, "Sometimes it means convicting, sometimes [i]t means dismissing." Neither convicting, the prerogative of a jury, nor dismissing, the prerogative of a judge, is in the hands of the prosecutor. Justice for a thief is to be convicted and penalized for his crime. She is calling for mercy, to spare a young man from the punishment he deserves for the crime he has committed. Undergirding this whole approach to justice is a failure to understand human nature. It doesn't work -- not even in schools -- because some people have decided to pursue evil.

Let's learn more about Colleen McCarty's inspiration: Adam Foss served 7 years and 9 months as an Assistant District Attorney (ADA) in the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, DA's office -- that's in Boston. He gave a TED talk in 2016, "A Prosecutor's Vision for a Better Justice System," that gave him a national profile. In 2017, he founded Prosecutor Impact, described on the University of Oregon's Diversity and Inclusion page as "a non-profit developing training and curriculum for prosecutors to reframe their role in the criminal justice system." (Emphasis added.) A left-wing foundation that gave a $250,000 grant to Prosecutor Impact described the organization:

Adam Foss's experience as an Assistant District Attorney (ADA) in Boston convinced him that prosecutors are the most influential actors in the criminal justice system. One ADA's discretion and decisions can make the difference between a young person being charged with multiple felonies and beginning their adulthood in prison, or being diverted from the system without a criminal record and giving them second chance. By providing ADAs with the training and resources to approach their jobs with compassion, knowledge and creativity, he believes he can make a substantial impact on thousands, if not millions, of lives. Foss founded Prosecutor Impact in 2016 and began to seek partners who would be willing to test a radical new way to prepare ADAs for work. PI's model is very new, but grounded in experience and research and tested on a small scale in other cities. This proposal would support an unprecedented partnership in Philadelphia's District Attorney's office that will allow them to credibly test their eight-week program for incoming prosecutors.

Prosecutor Impact went out of business circa 2020, but its website was captured by the Wayback Machine.

A page called "The Role of the Prosecutor" sets out the strategy of Prosecutor Impact: Expose new ADAs to "those most in contact with the criminal justice system" in order to "inform prosecutors' decision-making at all points in the life of case [sic]". Foss wanted to groom ADAs to resist "pressures from judges, veteran police officers, court clerks, seasoned defense attorneys, and senior colleagues... [that] can wear down the resolve of new prosecutors and leave them feeling unsupported to make the tough decisions we want them to." "Prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system. Because they choose who to charge, what to charge them with, and the number and severity of the charges, prosecutors heavily influence the short and long-term outcomes of the people impacted by the system."

In a nutshell, the vision of criminal justice that inspired Colleen McCarty to go to law school is one in which progressive lawyers infiltrate DA's offices to become prosecutors who choose not to prosecute crimes. It's a vision of criminal justice that puts the criminal's future first. Protecting the public from predators is an afterthought.

McCarty says that her brief exposure to prosecution as a law student intern in the Tulsa County and Wagoner County DA's offices (two months and one month, respectively) convinced her that "it's impossible to 'do justice' in OKs justice system. The system has been written and architected to be unjust and to foster unjust results. One of the main reasons for this is sentence enhancements for any prior felony."

Seeing the Oklahoma District Attorney's Association (ODAA) successfully advocate against banning these prosecutorial tools against career criminals enraged McCarty and turned her against prosecution as a career.

When a task force in 2016 recommended restricting the use of sentence enhancements they put a bill forward to accomplish this. This is essentially the policy in State Question 805. The ODAA fought it and killed it in committee. FOUR TIMES.... Seeing how our elected DAs actively thwart the creation of a just system ultimately [p]ushed me out of choosing prosecution as a profession.

I'm going to guess that Colleen McCarty's publication and advocacy record by that point, her work for Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform to commute sentences and here law review articles arguing that DAs should stop finding workarounds to jail repeat offenders and drug pushers, would have made her a less-than-attractive applicant for an ADA position in any Oklahoma DA's office.

Instead, she went to work as an attorney and then Deputy Director for Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform and then founded the Oklahoma Appleseed Project, two organizations funded by leftist foundations and actively agitating to make it easier for career criminals to avoid jail or get out of jail earlier than they should, where they can go back to their career of hurting Oklahomans.

If your goal is to radically redefine the work of prosecuting crime, and you can't get hired as an ADA to infiltrate the system, running for DA as a stealth candidate would be the only path to your goal.

Colleen McCarty has been telling us for years exactly what kind of DA she wants to be. Colleen McCarty has been telling us for years that her vision of justice puts the criminal's best interests first. Here's hoping that Tulsa County's Republican voters will have the discernment to see that.

If you're on the home page, click "Continue reading" to see the original Twitter thread cited above, plus the other thread that survived her pre-campaign social media purge, plus a personal statement on the occasion of her promotion to Deputy Director of Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform.

You can learn a lot about a candidate from her LinkedIn profile. Hazy, gauzy work references on campaign mailers ("Small business owner!" "Entrepreneur!" "Community leader!") come into sharp focus, with organization names, dates of service, and job titles.

Colleen McCarty's LinkedIn profile reveals some things about her that ought to worry any Tulsa County resident who cares about public safety, anyone who has seen the damage done in cities across the nation by progressive DAs of the sort elected with the help of George Soros's money. Every job Colleen McCarty has had since becoming a lawyer has had turning criminals loose (euphemistically described as reducing incarceration rates) as a primary aim.

A friend who has seen McCarty speak a few times tells me that "she's an open book." Well, I've been reading that book, looking at the organizations she's led and the position papers she's written. The public speeches and private conversations on the campaign trail are just a new cover designed to market the leftist, soft-on-crime contents of the book to naïve conservatives. You should never judge a book by its cover.

Although she was a registered Democrat voter until a couple of years ago, and although she's only been an attorney for five and a half years, with only a few law-school internships as prosecutorial experience, McCarty is running as a Republican against incumbent District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler. The primary will be held on June 16, 2026.

So let's take a tour of Colleen McCarty's LinkedIn. Starting at the top, we see that she has her pronouns listed: "She/Her." Not a typical feature of a conservative's profile.

The preview of recent posts includes her claim to have "out raised [her] opponent by 3 times." In fact, Steve Kunzweiler raised $49,555.01, while McCarty raised $58,511.00. That's more, but not three times more. McCarty appears to be counting the $100,000.00 she loaned to the campaign. We've seen this move before: A loan to your own campaign can be a way to hide donors that might be politically inconvenient; these donors give after the election and the post-election contributions then are used to reimburse the candidate. This can be coordinated in advance, but the voters won't know until it's too late.

There's a lot to discuss in her LinkedIn profile, so if you're on the home page, click the "Continue reading" link as we delve into Colleen McCarty's work experience.

In addition to a lengthy primary ballot, Oklahoma voters will decide on June 16, 2026, whether to approve or reject a permanent and annually escalating increase in the minimum wage in Oklahoma. Oklahomans should reject this job-killer that is being pushed by socialists and other economic ignoramuses.

As economist Thomas Sowell says, the real minimum wage is always zero. If the economic benefit of a job is less than a mandated minimum wage, that job simply won't exist. The passage of higher state and local minimum wages has led to an increase in automation and elimination of jobs that provide young people a first step into the job market. From Sowell's Basic Economics:

Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker's productivity worth that amount -- and if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed. Yet minimum wage laws are almost always discussed politically in terms of the benefits on workers who receive those wages. Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force.

Pay for entry-level jobs has already been on the rise, above the statutory minimum wage, as employers face a shrinking labor pool.

And an entry-level job is not meant to support a family. It's meant to be a place where you learn the basic habits needed to work with other people and for other people, and to begin to learn and improve skills so that your labor can become valuable enough to support a family.

Oklahomans should vote no but probably won't, because a lot of money has been and will be spent to put sob-stories on TV commercials. Raising the minimum wage sounds like the "nice" thing to do, as long as you don't think about the people who will spend more time with no job at all, because employers (particularly the many small businesses that give young people their first shot at a job) will have to cut costs to stay in business, and because many small businesses just won't make it. If you actually want to understand the harm SQ 832 will do, read OCPA's articles on the topic or visit their website dedicated to the issue, www.sq832killsjobs.com.

We don't have to guess about this effect. The State of Washington's youth labor participation rate dropped as its minimum wage was on the same kind of inflation-indexed escalator created by 832. A targeted increase for fast-food workers in California killed jobs in that industry and stressed related industries.

Now to the details you won't see in the ads or on the ballot. Here is what voting yes on SQ 832 means in legal terms.

SQ 832 is a statutory initiative petition. Because a statute can be amended without a vote of the people, the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot is lower than for a constitutional amendment.

If SQ 832 passes, it will amend Oklahoma's existing minimum wage law, originally passed in 1965, 40 O.S. 197.1-197.17. Specifically, passage would amend section 197.2, which currently sets the Oklahoma minimum wage equal to the Federal minimum wage, and section 197.4, which defines who is and is not covered under the law. SQ 832 would also repeal 197.5. After the jump, you can see exactly what language will be added and what will be deleted.

You might wonder why Oklahoma has a minimum wage law at all, given the existence of a federal minimum wage. The federal minimum wage only applies to businesses engaged in interstate commerce, under the constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, the definition of which has been stretched to include just about every possible activity. The Oklahoma law acts as a backstop, covering any business that is outside the Federal Government's vast reach. There is currently a provision exempting employers who are covered under federal law, so that there is no potential conflict; that provision would be eliminated under 832.

There are exemptions under the existing law, many of which would be eliminated under 832. If SQ 832 passes, farm workers and feed-store employees, domestic servants (e.g. nannies, housekeepers), paperboys, part-time employees (less than 25 hours per week), high school students under 18 and college students under 22 would no longer be exempt from the state minimum wage. Exemptions would remain for federal employees, volunteers for charitable, religious, and non-profit organizations, truck drivers (regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission), reserve deputy sheriffs, anyone in an executive, managerial, or professional job, and outside salesmen. There will remain an existing exemption for businesses who have 10 or fewer full-time-equivalent employees at any one location and generate gross revenues of $100,000 or less, but that exemption level will not be indexed to inflation.

Under SQ 832 the Oklahoma minimum wage would immediately increase from $7.25 to $10.50 per hour, then to $12 in 2027, $13.50 in 2028, and $15 in 2029. From that point forward, it would be indexed to CPI-W, the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, a measure that, according to the US Department of Labor, reflects the spending of about 30% of the US population.

The proponents could have chosen an inflation index that better reflects Oklahoma's economy. They chose the option that increases the fastest. A broader measure, CPI-U, reflects about 90% of the US population. Here's an article from 2014 explaining the distinction between CPI-W and CPI-U and why both measures are maintained. CPI-U is also calculated for Census Bureau regions. CPI-U for the West South Central region (Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana) has been tracked since 2017. Over the last 8 years, CPI-U West South Central has increased by 27.470%, while CPI-W has increased by 31.800%.

But any indexing strategy risks an inflationary doom loop: Increasing prices trigger increased wages which increase business costs which increase prices. There's no provision to stop the escalator in response to a local recession.

After the link, the changes to the law that will be enacted if 832 passes.

Postdated to remain at the top of the page until the polls close on Tuesday, April 7, 2026.

Tuesday, April 7, 2026, is general election day for K-12 school board seats in Oklahoma. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Seats on technology center boards (what we used to call vocational-technical, or vo-tech, schools) are also on the ballot. Some cities (Sapulpa among them) have city council runoffs, and there are some municipal and school district propositions up for a vote as well, including four school bond propositions in Tulsa and seven general obligation bond issues and a sales tax increase in Broken Arrow. The Oklahoma State Election Board's online voter tool will let you know where to vote and will show you a sample of the ballot you'll see.

Here is the complete list of offices and propositions up for election today statewide.

Not everyone will have a reason to go to the polls today, but TPS, Broken Arrow, and Tulsa Tech District 7 cover a lot of area and a lot of voters between them, so double-check, just to be sure.

The following are my recommendations in the April 7, 2026, election, for races and propositions in the Tulsa and nearby cities and school districts. The name of the office links to the article I wrote on that race or proposition; the candidate's name leads to the candidate's website. Although party affiliation doesn't appear on the ballot for school and most municipal elections in Oklahoma, I've noted it below for those candidates I'm recommending.

School board elections:

Tulsa Public Schools, Office No. 4: E'Lena Ashley (R)(i)
Tulsa Public Schools, Office No. 7: Michael Phillips (R)
Tulsa Technology District, Office No. 7: Jim W. Baker (R) (i)

Justus-Tiawah Public Schools, Office No. 1: Ted King (R)
Liberty Public Schools, Office No. 1: Timothy Brown (R)
Mannford Public Schools, Office No. 1: Clayton Paslay (R)
Verdigris Public Schools, Office No. 1: Alicia Nees (R)

School propositions:

Tulsa Public Schools, Propositions 1 through 4 (Bond Issues): No
Inola Public Schools, Propositions 1 & 2 (Bond Issues): No
Central Tech, Proposition (2 mill permanent increase): Yes

Municipal elections:

Bixby, City of, Ward 4: Brad Girard (R) (i)
Sapulpa, City of, Ward 1, Seat 1: Mike Harris (R)
Sapulpa, City of, Ward 3, Seat 1: Alexander Hamilton (R) (i)
Sapulpa, City of, Ward 5, Seat 1: Davood Mortazavi (R) (i)

Municipal propositions:

Broken Arrow, City of, Propositions 1 through 7 (Bond Issues): Yes
Broken Arrow, City of, Proposition 8 (0.5%, five-year sales tax increase): No
Oologah, Town of, Proposition (5% hotel tax increase): No

Three municipalities in the Tulsa metropolitan area have council seats and a proposition on the April 7, 2026, ballot. Here is a brief account of each with my recommendations.

Oologah, Town of, Proposition (5% hotel tax increase): No. There is nothing about this election on the town's website or Facebook page, which suggests an intent to slide this past the voters unawares. The town has an existing lodging tax, but no hotels or motels. Taxes shouldn't be on an April ballot where voters have no other reason to go to the polls, and for that reason alone it should be defeated.

City of Bixby, Ward 4: Brad Girard (R) (i). I haven't found any complaints about eight-year incumbent Girard, currently the councilor serving as mayor. His opponent is Jake Rowland, also a registered Republican, who has filed for state representative and school board in the past. Rowland has posted about running for office, but hasn't posted anything about his reasons for running.

Sapulpa City Council:

Sapulpa has elections for three seats on its City Council. In Ward 1, appointed incumbent Democrat Elizabeth Reeder-Nicolas is challenged by Republican Mike Harris, pastor of Beams of Light Church in Sapulpa. There was a third candidate, Brandon Mull, owner of Water Street Tattoo, but he was eliminated in the February primary, just 10 votes behind the second-place candidate. (Nicolas got 74 votes, Harris 71, Mull 61.) Mull has endorsed Nicolas.

In Ward 3, Republican incumbent Alexander Hamilton faces Republican challenger Charlie Leroy Harrison, owner of Beverly Fine Jewelry. In Ward 5, Republican incumbent Davood Mortazavi, owner of Steak & Eggs restaurant, has a Republican challenger in Kent Glesener, a professional engineer, owner of Paradigm Construction and Engineering and co-founder of Shofar International Foundation.

Sapulpa Firefighters IAFF Local 194 has endorsed Nicolas and Mortazavi. The Sapulpa FOP has also endorsed Nicolas and Mortazavi. They did not make any endorsements in Ward 3.

There has been a huge ruckus in the Ward 5 race. A troublemaker printed off copies of an article about sharia law by Christie Glesener, co-founder of Shofar International Foundation, and then stapled a slip of paper to it calling attention to Mortazavi's exotic name, implying that there was a danger that he might impose Islamic law on Sapulpa.

(Here is a four-page, text-only version of Christie Glesener's article on sharia law from 2011.)

Mortazavi came to America from Iran as a child in 1983, one of many Iranian families that came to the United States after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to take refuge from the tyrannical regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Steak and Eggs restaurant, owned by Davood and his brother Jerry, features Veterans Hall, a separate dining room decorated with portraits of local veterans and available for free as a meeting place for local civic groups.

Christie and Kent Glesener have denounced the distribution of the article and insist that they were not involved in any way. Christie Glesener directly denied involvement in response to a Facebook post by a relative of Mortazavi.

Micah Choquette of the Sapulpa Times reported on the controversy in the Monday episode of the newspaper's podcast, but also reported on the recent final determination in a U. S. Department of Labor case against Paradigm Construction and Engineering, the firm owned by the Gleseners. The company has been debarred from federal contracts for three years because of violations of the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage act, misclassification of employees, and failure to pay overtime. The Gleseners made a final appeal to refer the case to the Secretary of Labor for review, but that appeal was denied on March 6, 2026. The DOL Wage and Hour Division (WHD) case number is 16-01093/94, and the Office of Administrative Law Judge case number is 2017-DBA-00010, and the Administrative Review Board case number is 2023-0054. Running a case search with any of those numbers will turn up a docket report tracing the case's history from 2017 to 2026. Here are links to the Administrative Law Judge's denial of summary judgment from August 27, 2020, the Administrative Law Judge's Decision and Order from August 28, 2023, Administrator's Response Brief from May 10, 2024, and the Decision and Order from January 30, 2026. However much one may disagree with the Davis-Bacon Act, if you're going to be a federal contractor, you had better obey the law and adhere to all the federal regulations that apply and are spelled out in your contract. If you screw up, best to admit fault and bring your practices into compliance.

Sapulpa Times has a playlist of interviews with candidates for Ward 1 and Ward 5. (Ward 3 candidates declined to be interviewed.) Included in the playlist is an interview with Central Tech Superintendent Kent Burris discussing the proposed permanent millage increase for the Career Tech district, which also appears on the April 7 ballot.

Here is a map of Sapulpa council districts. Ward 1 is the oldest section of Sapulpa, mainly between Main and Mission. Ward 3 is the southernmost district. Ward 5 covers mainly newly annexed areas east of Polecat Creek or north of Hilton Road.

I can appreciate the frustration that many Sapulpans have, particularly Sapulpans with businesses on Dewey Avenue (Route 66), with city decisions that have blocked access to their businesses, and the feeling that city government cares more about a few blocks of downtown while neglecting the rest of the city.

My recommendations:

Sapulpa, City of, Ward 1: Mike Harris (R)
Sapulpa, City of, Ward 3: Alexander Hamilton (R) (i)
Sapulpa, City of, Ward 5: Davood Mortazavi (R) (i)

Broken Arrow voters will face eight propositions on the Tuesday, April 7, 2026, ballot. The first seven are 20-year general obligation bond issues which will be repaid by higher property taxes. Proposition No. 8 is a half-cent, five-year sales tax for sports facilities.

Here is the sample ballot.

All seven bond issues are for 20-year terms. Below are the amounts and purposes listed in the gist for each proposition as listed on the ballot, stripped of the bond issue boilerplate:

Prop 1, Transportation Projects, $205,000,000: constructing, reconstructing, repairing, improving, and rehabilitating streets, roads, bridges, and intersections in the City (including lighting, sidewalks/bikepaths, landscaping, related drainage improvements, driveway reconstruction, and other related improvements).

Prop 2, Public Safety Projects, $65,000,000: acquiring, constructing, expanding, renovating, repairing, and/or equipping public safety buildings, facilities, and equipment, all to be owned exclusively by the City.

Prop 3, Quality of Life Projects, $74,000,000: constructing, expanding, repairing, which may also include improving, renovating, acquiring and equipping parks and recreational facilities, all to be owned exclusively by the City, or in the alternative to acquire all or a distinct portion of such property pursuant to a lease purchase arrangement.

Prop 4, Public Facilities Projects, $65,000,000: acquiring, constructing, expanding, renovating, repairing, and equipping municipal buildings, facilities, and equipment, all to be owned exclusively by the City.

Prop 5, Stormwater Projects, $6,000,000: constructing, expanding, repairing, which may also include improving, renovating, acquiring and equipping stormwater facilities on property owned exclusively or in part by the City.

Prop 6, Drainage Projects, $5,000,000: drainage improvements to property owned exclusively or in part by the City.

Prop 7, Library Project, $4,000,000: economic and community development including a new South Broken Arrow library. According to Broken Arrow officials, the current library has outgrown its space. Some of the funding for the new building will be provided by the Tulsa City-County Library system from the property tax revenues from its existing millage.

Prop 8, Sports Facilities Sales Tax, 0.5% for 5 years: sports facilities benefitting the City, including but not limited to Indian Springs Sports Complex, Arrowhead Softball Complex, Nienhuis Sports Complex, and Challenger Sports Complex.

The Bond Transparency Act of 2017 (God bless State Rep. John Paul Jordan and State Sen. Nathan Dahm for getting this in the statute book) disclosure lists the specific projects for each bond proposal, along with an estimated cost for each. Unlike the "district wide" fudge in the Tulsa Public Schools' list of bond projects, Broken Arrow names specific intersections and subdivisions. For example:

Widen and/or improve Tucson Street (121st Street) from Aspen Avenue (145th E. Avenue) to Olive Avenue (129th E. Avenue) including, but not limited to, design, construction of required appurtenances, and acquisition of easements and right-of-way. $15,600,000

The biggest single item in the seven bond propositions is $42 million for a new community center at Elam Park, near Aspen and Florence behind Aspen Creek Elementary, plus an additional $4 million for outdoor facilities at the park. That money is in Proposition 3.

Proposition 4 for Public Facilities includes renovation and expansion of the Senior Center, Rose District Plaza, the BA History Museum, and Arts@302, and moving the Military History Museum to near Veterans Park.

The Bond Transparency Act disclosure goes all the way back to the 2004 Bond Issue, listing projects funded with past bonds, percent complete, and which bonds are still outstanding.

The bond issue vote-yes website states that bonds will be sold over an 11-year period as current bonds expire to keep the overall millage rate from rising. If the bond issues fail, property taxes on a home worth the median value in Broken Arrow of $229,300 will drop gradually, reaching a savings of $110.98 per year by 2030 and $324.37 per year for 2038 and thereafter (if no other bond issue is approved).

So well done to Broken Arrow officials for listing specific projects and grouping them according to subject matter, unlike Tulsa Public Schools and Inola Public Schools. That earns them some trust. If I lived in Broken Arrow, I would be inclined to vote for most or all of the first seven propositions.

Still, it's worth asking whether a new, bigger South BA library (Prop 7) is a better idea than an additional branch to serve the growing neighborhoods south of the Creek Turnpike, or whether the Military History Museum needs to move into a new facility (Prop 4).

Even infrastructure projects like streets and drainage deserve scrutiny: One BA reader wrote to question the length of time it takes to make the improvements and whether some of them make enough of a difference to be worth the cost and disruption. He notes how often these projects seem to fall massively behind schedule.

And putting the propositions on the ballot in April, when there is nothing else on the ballot for most Broken Arrow residents, is a bad-faith move. It indicates an intention to minimize turnout in order to allow those who have a direct interest in passage to dominate the electorate.

Even worse is putting a significant sales tax increase for questionable sports facilities expenditures on the same ballot as far less controversial bond issue proposals that won't raise tax rates over current levels. Proponents have been careful to avoid mentioning that Proposition 8 raises the sales tax rate, and in the Wagoner County part of the city, the total rate (state, county, city) will be over 10%. You have to be tuned in to the fact that they don't give the usual reassurance that your sales tax rate won't go up, as when one temporary tax replaces another. It looks like they're hoping that voters won't distinguish between the propositions, and they'll keep voting yes out of momentum.

The package of propositions has generated some opposition. Fox 23 (or 8.2 or whatever it actually is now) covered Thursday night's protest by Taxed Enough Already (TEA), and Brent Watson has posted his reasons for opposing Proposition 8:

Why TEA opposes the Broken Arrow 2026 Sales Tax Increase

EXTREME

• If passed this increase will place us in the top 1% of sales tax rates imposed on citizens. The combined tax rate for Broken Arrow citizens living in Wagoner County would be 10.1%. There is something very wrong with a double-digit sales tax rate! This is higher that most folks tithe to their churches.
• The ONLY major ***cities in the US with higher rates are Chicago at 10.25% and Seattle at 10.35%. Citizens of BA do not want to live in Chicago, and we don't want to be taxed like that! Don't Chicago our Broken Arrow! ***Population >500,000
• For those living in Tulsa County, the combined rate will be nearly 9% - 8.917% This is far above the average US sales tax rate of 7.53.

EXPENSIVE

• For a family of four, this tax will cost over $1,760. This regressive, anti-family tax would cost approximately $441 per person over the 5-year life. Styling this as a "half-penny" is disingenuous.

UNNECESSARY

• This is an unnecessary tax to replace sports facilities. This is not for necessary provisions like roads, police, or fire protection. The City should live within its budget. Alternate funding, including raising user fees, redirecting other spending or obtaining private donations can be used to make improvements.

ENDURING

• This will probably become a permanent tax. Despite the City's assurance that this is a 5-year tax, history shows that most temporary taxes are rolled over into other permanent taxes - as was the Vision 2025 tax. Also, all 7 bond proposals are rollovers of previously imposed property taxes - just now designated for other usages. This is how temporary taxes become permanent taxes.

IMPROPERLY PURSUED

• City leaders scheduled this as a special election instead of placing it with a primary or general election. Special elections are often decided by less than 20% (sometimes less than 5%) of registered voters. Officials know that they can count on those with vested interests to vote for these taxes. This is how our taxes continue to be raised incrementally to very high rates. Additionally, the City has spent a huge amount of money on billboards and expensive mailers promoting this tax increase. They have omitted disclosing the true cost per person and family and that this would raise part of Broken Arrow to a sales tax rate over 10%. This would mean that every time someone spends $100 at WalMart, they would pay over $10 in tax.

SUMMARY:

We are taxed enough already. In the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, we are rising to oppose oppressive taxes. Please vote for family and common sense values and vote NO April 7 to this tax grab. We need to tell our city leaders: "Don't Chicago my Broken Arrow!"

NOTES:

As of early 2026, the nationwide population-weighted average combined state and local sales tax rate in the United States is approximately 7.53%. Tax Foundation

Calculation of cost per capita: The City states collections will total about $53M, divided by current population of 120,000 = $441.67/person.

If I lived in BA, I would vote Yes on Propositions 1 through 7 (bond issues), NO on Proposition 8 (sales tax).

Some information on other school board races and school propositions in the Tulsa area.

Keep in mind that I don't live in these communities, and so my information is limited, but what I've found, I present below, and hopefully you'll find it helpful. I'd welcome any additional information readers could offer. I will tell you how I would vote based on what I've presented, but treat it as a very tentative recommendation, particularly in the school board races.

Inola school bond issue:

Inola Public Schools has two propositions, each for $29,900,000, over 18 years, with very similar lists of specific projects on each. The Bond 2026 page has a pretty detailed explanation and a response to Frequently Asked Questions, such as the impact of the expansion Sofidel facility on the Net Assessed Value of property in the district, which is the basis for calculating property tax increases to repay the bonds. They acknowledge that property taxes will increase if either or both propositions pass, while a more recent 2023 bond issue will expire in 2028. The Sofidel plant expansion will not benefit the school district for 7 years because it is in a Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district and any taxes resulting from the increase in property value will be captured for TIF district improvements. Proponents state that the taxes are necessary to address overcrowding in schools, as new housing developments are being built and modular buildings are already being used to house the 1st Grade. The expansion would also allow 5th graders to move out of the middle/high school campus and back to elementary school.

The Inola Bond Transparency Act statement lists the spending on the much smaller 2023 bond issue propositions, $2,075,000.00 for building improvements and materials, and $510,000.00 for vehicles for pupil transportation.

As in Tulsa, the Inola bond propositions are a hodgepodge of different types of projects. There's no way to vote for air conditioning for the secondary gym or additional elementary classrooms without also voting for giving out Chromebooks to all the students. Districts and municipalities consistently violate the state constitution's single-subject rule, and they get away with it, because someone would have to pay for the lawsuit to enforce it, with no guarantee that a judge would handle the suit fairly.

I noticed a few Vote No signs around Inola, including the two planted at the intersection of Broadway and Commercial next to two Vote Yes signs (photo above). One of the signs claims that 37% of the money raised by the property tax increase will leave the district to pay banks and investors. Given the amount being raised and the long term of the bonds, that is not surprising.

My inclination would be to vote no and then ask the board to try again, with different propositions to allow voters to pick and choose which spending they deem necessary (more classrooms, air conditioning for the old gym) and which (Chromebooks) they deem harmful. Whittling the propositions down to the most essential would also make it easier and less expensive to finance the projects.

Central Tech 2-mill property tax increase:

Central Tech is the Career Tech district covering nearly all of Creek County, plus parts of Osage, Pawnee, Payne, and Lincoln Counties. The district is seeking a permanent tax increase of 2 mills, to be added to the current levy of 10 mills for general fund and 3 mills for the building fund. The district has no bonded indebtedness. The website for the tax increase says, "Many long-term career programs are at capacity, and there are more than 400 students currently on wait lists." The district's Estimate of Needs lays out Central Tech's revenues and expenditures from 2024-2025 and the forecast numbers for 2025-2026. The additional 2 mills would generate an estimated $3.3 million per year in addition to the roughly $22 million in taxes currently generated. An extra 2 mills is an extra $20 per year on a $100,000 house with a homestead exemption. That would be 15 mills total; compare that with 13.33 mills for Tulsa Technology Center.

A yes or no vote would depend on how confident I was in the stewardship of the Central Tech board and administration. I could see where a district with a lower net valuation would need a higher millage than Tulsa Tech to generate sufficient revenue to meet program demand. You can read the most recent two years' audits on the State Auditor's website: 2023-2024, 2022-2023. I don't see any adverse findings. I'd lean towards voting yes.

After the jump, a look at school board races in Liberty, Verdigris, and Mannford.

Tulsa Public Schools is asking voters to approve four bond issue propositions, totalling $609 million, on the April 7, 2026, ballot. Every voter registered within the boundaries of Tulsa Public Schools is eligible to vote, regardless of party registration, whether or not you have children in TPS, whether or not you directly pay property taxes. The breakdown and ballot language is here.

Proposition No. 1: $200,985,000, due in 5 years, "to provide funds for the purpose of purchasing or acquiring textbooks, library books, electronic media content, computer software, perpetual or continuous district software license agreements and web-based software subscriptions, along with programs and facilities for early childhood, Montessori, stem labs, post-secondary readiness, fine arts, and athletics including the construction, equipping, repairing and remodeling of those facilities, acquiring and improving school sites, and purchasing or acquiring school furniture, fixtures, and equipment...."

Proposition No. 2: $276,000,000, due in 15 years, for "repairing, remodeling, constructing and equipping school buildings, purchasing or acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment and acquiring and improving school sites...."

Proposition No. 3: $104,785,000, due in 5 years, for "purchasing or acquiring technology equipment including computer hardware and software and web-based software subscriptions along with repairing and remodeling school buildings to accommodate technology equipment...."

Proposition No. 4: 27,230,000, due in 5 years, for "purchasing or acquiring transportation equipment...."

There's a further "breakdown" of each proposition into "specific projects" at the link, but it doesn't get into specifics as to which school sites will receive the specified improvements. The term "district wide" gets used a lot. The grouping is puzzling, and there seems to be overlap between Prop 1 and Prop 3 when it comes to computer equipment. The phrase "including but not limited to" applies to each list of spending line items. There really isn't a way for a voter to choose traditional bond issue items like building repairs, without also voting for computer software. It's a violation, in spirit, of the single-subject rule in the Oklahoma Constitution.

The biggest line items in the breakdown, everything over $10 million, in descending order:

• $119,095,000 in Prop 2: Remodeling of various school facilities district wide; furniture purchase or acquisition for school facilities district wide; painting flooring service contracts for school facilities district wide; window repair and replacement for school facilities district wide; foundation and paving repairs for school facilities district wide; and LED lighting replacement for school facilities district wide.
• $68,324,000 in Prop 3: Student & Teaching Technology
• $67,760,000 in Prop 2: HVAC repair and replacement for school facilities district wide
• $61,292,000 in Prop 1: Instructional learning materials; textbooks; instructional electronic media content and software; exceptional and special needs equipment and curriculum
• $42,192,000 in Prop 2: Safety and Security, Entries, Fencing and Radios including secure entry and security improvement for school facilities district wide; fencing at school facilities district wide; radios district wide and alarm panels and sensor replacements for school facilities district wide
• $40,900,000 in Prop 1: Post-secondary readiness and career academies district wide
• $40,567,000 in Prop 1: Wellness and physical education equipment purchase or acquisition; and constructing, equipping, repairing and remodeling school facilities district wide including sports fields, turf, and facilities
• $33,730,000 in Prop 3: Cybersecurity, data storage, and network systems and software
• $22,000,000 in Prop 2: Roof replacement or repair for school facilities district wide
• $14,020,000 in Prop 4: Buses
• $12,804,000 in Prop 1: Fine arts facilities district wide including improvements to auditorium stage, sound, and lighting; fine arts uniforms, equipment, and instruments
• $12,250,000 in Prop 2: Dining, kitchen improvements and kitchen equipment purchase or acquisition for school facilities district wide
• $11,550,000 in Prop 1: Site project funding for repairing, remodeling, constructing, and equipping school facilities district wide along with the purchase or acquisition of equipment
• $10,860,000 in Prop 1: Early childhood and Montessori programs district wide

The money for "post-secondary readiness and career academies" and "early childhood and Montessori programs" looks like mission creep. Is this money for new buildings? It can't be used to pay salaries. Will it be used to pay consultants? Are these projects that the philanthropocrats are pushing for?

Former Tulsa City Councilor and financial analyst Jayme Fowler urges a no vote on all four propositions. He points out that the TPS cost per student is 25% more than the cost of private school and has increased 56% since 2018, with a 73% increase in non-instructional costs and a 21% drop in student achievement in that same time frame. Fowler notes that TPS had about 80,000 students and 9 high schools in 1969. 57 years later, TPS still has 9 high schools but only about 34,000 students. (Granted, TPS opened a high school, Mason, and closed it a few years later in the 1970s.) Fowler wants TPS to consolidate programs to fewer campuses and sell off surplus properties.

TPS Per Pupil Expenditure is $14,415.28. That's twice the amount per student spent by Tulsa Classical Academy ($7,115.67) and higher than the state average of $11,962.54.

Fowler writes:

This $609 Million bond package is business as usual on auto-pilot. The bonds continue the long history of zero accountability and the inevitable waste of tax-payer money. But far worse, they rob our children of the future they deserve and reward the system and the people responsible for that theft. The proposals are entirely out of sync with the TPS 5-year plan. The Pathways to Opportunity plan is a commitment made to students and families that TPS must keep.

Fowler reminds us that TPS was audited on a small portion of their spending, and the audit found massive fraud:

[The State Auditor] Investigated $37.7 million in spending, 2015 - 2023. Only included 90 vendors and 900 invoices. That's less than 1% of the $4.1 Billion spent by TPS in that timeframe. [The audit] Uncovered wire fraud, misappropriation of funds, illegal no-bid contracts & payments, and coordinated attempts to hide spending related communications in violation of the open records act. A single person, Devin Fletcher was charged for misappropriating $824,000. TPS Illegally paid over $500,000 in bonuses to 35 administrators and 5 other employees through a third-party, Foundation for Tulsa Schools. It's time to audit the other 99% of TPS spending!

Not all conservatives are opposed to the bond issues. Bob Jack, former Tulsa County Republican Party chairman, served on the TPS Bond Development Committee and urges voters to support it. He claims that concerns of lack of financial control are outdated. "...[U]nder the leadership of a new CFO and the addition of internal auditor, patrons of TPS can be assured that the problems of the past are no longer an excuse."

Oklahoma's use of long and rotating board terms, with elections happening at an odd time of year, mean that our public school boards don't have much in the way of effective accountability from the voters. Unfortunately, at most two Tulsa board members are up for election every year, and it takes four years for each seat to come up in turn. Voting down bond issues are an excellent way for voters to get the attention of the board and the administration.

I could make an argument for voting for Propositions 2 and 4, which are more in line with traditional bond issues for facilities and transportation, but against 1 and 3, which includes new programs and more money for non-facility items. Even so, TPS's record of financial irresponsibility makes me wonder about how much fluff and padding is in the numbers for those "non-controversial" line items. It would be reasonable to expect the board to commit to truly specific projects, naming the schools that will receive new roofs or the specific sports and fine arts facilities that will be upgraded. That would also be a way for the voters to ensure that there isn't favoritism in the allocation of improvement money to schools. Without those specifics, there's nothing to hold TPS to.

I encourage TPS residents to vote no on April 7, 2026, on all four Tulsa Public School bond issues.

MORE:

The Bond Transparency Act of 2017 requires public school districts to report annually on their outstanding bond issues -- how much was approved, how much has been bonded, how much has been spent and on what specific items. These reports do delve into which specific school buildings received which upgrades and at what cost.

• 2015 Tulsa Public Schools Bond Transparency Report
• 2021 Tulsa Public Schools Bond Transparency Report
• Tulsa Public Schools 2026 Bond Website
• Tulsa Public Schools 2021 Bond Website

Conservative author and journalist Ted King is running for the Office 1 school board seat in the Justus-Tiawah School District in Rogers County, east of Claremore. Justus-Tiawah is a PK-8 district, with no high school. It serves 460 students from two campuses, Pre-Kindergarten to 2nd Grade in Tiawah and 3rd through 8th Grades on Highway 20 near Will Rogers Downs. Like all elementary districts, Justus-Tiawah has only three school board members. The election will be held on Tuesday, April 7, 2026. Early voting at the Rogers County Election Board, 415 W. 1st St., Claremore, will be held on Thursday and Friday, April 2-3, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

King is the author of Cowboy Bethlehem: The Story of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey, published in 2025, and The War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State, published in 2009.

I've known Ted King for many years and am proud to call him a friend. When the United Kingdom officially "Brexit-ed" the European Union, Ted and I met at the White Lion pub to toast the happy event with a celebratory pint. He and I both had the opportunity to meet the head of the Reform UK Party, Nigel Farage, before his 2021 Tulsa speech; Farage is on track to be elected Prime Minister in 2029 or sooner.

Ted King was urged to run by Mary Alice Nelson, a fellow rural Rogers County resident, Cal-Berkeley graduate, horse trainer, and frequent caller to the Pat Campbell Show on KFAQ. Mary Alice, who passed away last November at the age of 91, believed that more people should step up and take leadership in their communities. Ted shares Mary Alice's commitment to a "back to basics" approach to education that celebrates the founding principles of America and provides our young people with a solid foundation of truth.

While the Justus-Tiawah District administration is proud of being above the state average, there's plenty of room for improvement. Only 31% of its students tested as proficient or better in English Language Arts and only 38% tested as proficient or better in math.

The district has about 3,100 voters, 70% of whom are, like Ted King, registered Republican. Incumbent Pamela Chandler is registered as an independent. Neither appear to have a campaign website, but here are their Facebook profiles: Pamela Chandler, Ted King. In last year's election, only 181 votes were cast.

All voters in the school district are eligible to cast a ballot in this election. I hope you'll vote for my friend Ted King and put a thoughtful conservative Christian, committed to educational excellence, on the Justus-Tiawah school board.

There are two Tulsa school board seats up for election on April 7, 2026. Voters on the southern edge of the Tulsa Public Schools district have the opportunity to elect an experienced educator to become the second conservative Republican on the board to push for accountability, transparency, and real education.

Michael Phillips, running for Tulsa Public Schools Office 7, is retired from twenty-two years as a high school math teacher in Tulsa Public Schools. Phillips's assignments included Central and Edison High Schools. He is also a founder of and leader in the Tulsa County Republican Men's Club.

On his website, Phillips explains his reasons for running and his goals for his work as a board member.

Michael and his wife have attended virtually every school board meeting in person starting the summer of 2022. Michael observed that the vast majority of the agenda items (including spending hundreds of millions of dollars) were passed with little or no public discussion. Thus, the public remained unaware of the pluses and minuses of how the money was being used. It looked like the board was simply rubber stamping what the administration had already decided to do. That worried Michael. The worry grew and he decided to run for a seat at the table.

If elected he pledges to press for:

(1) options the board can openly discuss

(2) agenda items that allow the board to fulfill its duty of setting the vision for the district

(3) the ability to temporarily postpone portions of the agenda to a date certain so that the board can investigate the usefulness of the items for educating children

He pledges to serve his constituents by soliciting and reporting their input, making the successful education of children the primary concern, and using his judgment when voting.

On his campaign Facebook page, Michael Phillips addresses a number of issues in short videos, including the importance of respect for teachers from administration and students as a factor in teacher retention and why the board needs to direct more money to the classroom and less to administrative overhead. Phillips has been walking his district since before the new year, through all kinds of weather, and with the help of supporters like State Sen. and legendary TU football coach Dave Rader. Congressman Kevin Hern has endorsed Michael Phillips's run for school board.

Phillips is running to unseat Democrat incumbent Susan Lamkin, who has been a rubber stamp for the TPS administration and TPS's rampant and wasteful spending on consultants at the behest of the local philanthroparchy, who use strings-attached "donations" to dictate school policy. Lamkin has received three reported donations: $3,500 from Lynn Schusterman; $1,000 from Steve Mitchell, CEO of Argonaut, George Kaiser's private equity fund (remember Solyndra?); and $500 from Fred Dorwart, attorney for George Kaiser's network of businesses and organizations. The same bunch funded her very pricey 2022 campaign. A vote for Lamkin is a vote to let these left-wing philanthropocrats continue to use Tulsa Public Schools as a guinea pig for their social experiments. (Campaign contribution and expenditure reports can be found by searching on the Oklahoma Ethics Commission local campaign filings page. Sorry, no permalinks.)

I'm grateful to have had E'Lena Ashley on the school board these past four years, and I'm hopeful that she will be re-elected. If we also get Michael Phillips elected, we'll have two conservative Republicans on the board who can collaborate and support one another as they seek to hold the TPS administration accountable and begin to align the district with sound fiscal and educational policy.

We have exactly one conservative Republican on the school board of one of the largest school districts in Oklahoma. Her name is E'Lena Ashley. In 2022, she defeated the incumbent to win Office 4 to represent east Tulsa on the Tulsa Public School board, where she has been a constant and often lone voice for wisdom and accountability. E'Lena Ashley is up for re-election on April 7, 2026, and TPS taxpayers and parents need her back on the board.

Since taking office, E'Lena Ashley has held monthly community meetings where she has communicated news from the school district, listened to the concerns of the community, and invited speakers on a variety of topics related to TPS, including Superintendent Dr. Ebony Johnson. On the board, she has been a constructive critic of the administration and the board majority. In 2025, Ashley and then-board member Dr. Jennettie Marshall held a press conference to spotlight the findings of the State Auditor's report on TPS financial mismanagement, complaining that, although the leadership at the top had changed, the administration was still not providing board members with the information they requested.

Ashley and Marshall also joined forces in a lawsuit challenging the board majority's lack of transparency and move to hire interim Superintendent Ebony Johnson without following the board's written policy requiring a nationwide search. Ashley has been blamed for the money the district spent to defend against the lawsuit, but surely the expense could have been avoided by the board following its policies and striving for transparency. Although the lawsuit was unsuccessful, I admire Ashley's willingness to take a stand for transparency on behalf of the taxpayers and parents of the district.

Four years ago, we briefly had some hope of a majority of Tulsa school board members committed to financial responsibility and accountability. Jennettie Marshall and Jerry Griffin had been advocates for transparency on the board, and E'Lena Ashley was running to defeat an incumbent while former District Attorney Tim Harris was running for the open seat in Office 7. Harris was narrowly defeated in a very expensive campaign, but with Ashley's election there was a substantial minority of three reformers on the board. With a rubber-stamp member missing from a July 2022 board meeting, Ashley, Griffin, and Marshall were able to block a consent agenda packed with controversial items, including accepting Chinese Communist funding for "Confucius Classroom" at Booker T. Washington High School. In the end, Ashley was the only vote against accepting the Confucius Classroom grant.

And now, with Griffin and Marshall deciding not to run for re-election out of frustration with administration stonewalling, Ashley is the lone voice for transparency and fiscal sanity. The administration continues to waste money on consultants and outside vendors, continues to be driven by unaccountable philanthropocrats. When the administration tries to smuggle questionable spending and controversial proposals into the consent agenda, E'Lena Ashley uses her seat at the table to pull those items aside for scrutiny. Despite her willingness to stand alone on many issues, E'Lena manages to remain gracious in her questions and her interactions with the administration. If we lose her, we lose that lone voice. We need E'Lena Ashley back for another four years, and we need to elect conservative Republican Michael Phillips, who is running against incumbent Democrat Susan Lamkin for Office 7.

Ashley's opponent is former Tulsa City Councilor Connie Dodson. Dodson was defeated for re-election in 2022 by Christian Bengel. As a councilor, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dodson advocated for drive-thru private dances to keep strip-club dancers employed:

An enterprising owner of a Tulsa "gentlemen's club" wants to go all Las Vegas and offer drive-thru service.

So City Councilor Connie Dodson -- ever responsive to the needs of her constituents -- has asked city legal the question everyone is wondering but no one will say out loud: In these grave times of economic peril, deadly disease and social distancing, can we do the same thing here in Tulsa?

"When the owner reached out to me, I said, 'I applaud your efforts to be creative,'?" Dodson said. "I mean, that is what everybody is trying to do now ... be creative so that they can stay in business and keep people employed."...

"Set up one of those large white tents that you can drive through, so the patron would literally drive into the tent, pay their money, get a private show or a private dance, and not get out of their car," she said....

Dodson said what she's heard is that the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 outbreak has hit dancers particularly hard.

"So they are trying to be real creative in keeping their businesses running, and this was something that came up, and I thought, I'll reach out," she said.

After I endorsed Bengel over Dodson, I received an irate and bizarre Facebook message from D. Richard Dodson, who appears to be Connie Dodson's husband. Mr. Dodson accused me of being full of "donkey bullsh[**]." This person's Facebook "likes" revealed a great deal of interest in strip clubs, sex toy shops, BDSM, and barbecue, which might explain Councilor Dodson's legislative concerns. The profile has since been taken over by a Vietnamese spammer, but those "likes" are still there. (I have screenshots of the state of the profile as it was at the time of Mr. Dodson's unhinged complaint.)

My suspicion is that Dodson was asked to run because she can be counted on to be a rubber-stamp and not to ask uncomfortable questions. Having just one board member who asks questions is too many for the people pulling the strings, because it exposes their plans to public scrutiny.

I'm proud to endorse E'Lena Ashley for re-election and urge east Tulsans to vote for her on Tuesday, April 7, 2026.

Tulsa Technology Center is a wonderful asset for the Tulsa metro area. On a relatively small millage (13.33 mills) and no bond issues, the district built and maintains six modern campuses and offers training for an extensive range of careers. The district suffered a significant setback with extensive tornado damage to the North Peoria campus on March 6, 2026.

Republican incumbent Jim W. Baker is running for re-election to a 7-year term to the board of the Tulsa Technology Center. Baker serves Office 7, which covers the southern part of Tulsa County, including Bixby, Glenpool, Jenks, and most of Tulsa south of 81st Street, and the portions of Okmulgee and Wagoner counties in the Tulsa Tech district. Baker has been the board member for District 7 since 1988. The election is April 7, 2026. There are two candidates; Baker is being challenged by school teacher Matthew McAfee.

Scott Gaspar offered this tribute to Jim Baker on his Facebook profile:

Over 40 years ago, I met Dr. Jim Baker in high school through his DECA class (Distributive Education Clubs of America)--a student organization designed to prepare young people for careers in marketing, finance, hospitality, and management. I signed up mostly because it sounded like an easy class that let me leave school early every day.

Classic teenage thinking.

What I actually found--and what thousands of others who crossed paths with Dr. Baker discovered--was something far more powerful: a life-changing experience that still shapes how I approach life and business today.

Dr. Baker's class had a completely different culture, so different that many other teachers openly criticized it. We weren't just taught to think about things; we were taught to do them. When a topic came up, we didn't stop at classroom theory. Dr. Baker brought in real-world examples and connected us directly with the professionals involved. The level of engagement was unlike anything I had ever experienced in school.

Assignments required us to call or meet with actual business owners, bankers, and entrepreneurs. We developed real business plans, financial forecasts, and marketing strategies. We learned the genuine work ethic needed for success after graduation. We used technology and research tools to explore business processes, accounting, and marketing far beyond any textbook.

Dr. Baker introduced us to an entirely new culture of education--and we embraced it. We worked hard on presentations and built meaningful, lifelong relationships with business leaders. For the first time, we truly understood the realities of work, the challenges of building a business, and the sacrifices successful people make. In the 1980s, Dr. Baker was already teaching Career and Technical Education (CTE) before the term even existed.

I've followed his career ever since. He carries that same culture of responsibility, accountability, and real-world focus wherever he goes. He's not a polished politician--he has zero tolerance for nonsense--but his record is extraordinary. His credentials are outstanding, his experience vast, and most importantly, he has produced thousands of living success stories: professionals and business owners across Oklahoma and the United States who credit him with changing their trajectories.

Dr. Baker played a pivotal role in transforming what we kids of the '70s and '80s jokingly called "the high school with ashtrays" (Tulsa Vo-Tech) into one of the premier Career Technology institutions in the country. Today, Tulsa Tech offers cutting-edge programs in cybersecurity, radiology, aviation, biotechnology, and much more.

He has led the modernization and expansion of outdated 1960s- and '70s-era facilities without relying on the large, burdensome bond measures common in other public school districts. (Tulsa Tech is a public school district.) The entire community has benefited.

Dr. Jim Baker is running for re-election on April 7th.

These school board elections are poorly publicized and typically see very low turnout. In District 7, only about 2,000 votes are usually cast out of more than 96,000 eligible voters. Dr. Baker faces a well-funded opponent in [Matthew] McAfee, whose background includes teaching at Edison and a short-lived bookstore venture in Mother Road Market that closed after a couple of years. McAfee left teaching in 2019, with no subsequent public employment record listed, yet he presents this as qualification to manage Tulsa Tech's $335 million+ budget. His campaign has been active, with events and a strong volunteer team.

If you live in the Tulsa area, Dr. Baker has almost certainly touched your life--through the skilled nurse who cared for you in the ER, the IT professional who keeps your systems secure, the aircraft technician who maintains the plane you fly on, the firefighter who protects your community, or the entrepreneur who runs your favorite restaurant. Countless graduates credit their success to the education they received at Tulsa Tech under his leadership.

I encourage everyone to vote in school board elections, even if you don't have children in the system. The graduates of Tulsa Tech become the professionals we all rely on every day. While these races have become increasingly political, experience, results, and vision should still matter most.

Please do your own research and vote based on track record. If you've ever visited a Tulsa Tech campus, hired one of its excellent graduates, or benefited from its programs, I hope you'll support Dr. Baker on April 7th so this proven culture of excellence can continue.

Whether you're in District 7 or not, please share this. Dr. Baker has given more than 40 years of selfless service to our community and proven leadership at scale.

Chances are, someone you know has been positively impacted by his work. Let's make sure it continues. If you would like to learn more about Jim, visit his website: https://drjimbaker.com/

Here are some additional details:

• Holds a Doctorate from OSU in Occupational Adult Education
• Expanded Tulsa Tech to multiple campuses
• Added dozens of new career paths to the Tulsa Tech offering
• Embedded career tech programs into Tulsa high schools
• Helped build state of the art facilities
• Attracted industry-leading instructors
• Vision of Excellence Award
• Tulsa Tech Hall of Fame
• Oklahoma All-State School Board Member
• Former Jenks Teacher of The Year
• Former Oklahoma Marketing Teacher of The Year
• Former Oklahoma Career Tech Teacher of The Year
• Former Region IV Career Tech Teacher of The Year
• 40 Years of law enforcement service as a reserve officer
• FEMA certified

If you would like to research his opponent, [Matthew] McAfee, here is his website: https://sites.google.com/view/mcafee-for-tulsa-tech/home

Please share, comment, and most importantly participate in this election.

Baker is a registered Republican voter. 21 years ago, when he was running for his third full term, I published a statement from his campaign, with the note that his campaign advisor, whom I met at Republican county headquarters where we were both volunteering to get out the vote for the 2004 election, called Baker the conservative in the race.

You can find Baker's campaign contribution and expenditures filings at the new Oklahoma Ethics Commission Local Campaign Finance Transparency Portal. Unfortunately, the Ethics Commission is still allergic to permalinks for individual candidates or reports, but if you'll go to the portal, you can search the name Baker and find his filings to date. Baker has raised $8,130 and spent $6,300.

Matthew McAfee is also a registered Republican, although his wife is a registered independent. Matthew McAfee was registered as an independent when the couple lived in the Yorktown neighborhood in Midtown, prior to their move to south Tulsa and Tulsa Tech District 7 in February 2023. McAfee served as Yorktown Neighborhood Association's representative on the Tulsa Preservation Commission and as president. The couple owned Eleanor's Bookshop in the Shops at Mother Road Market at 11th and Lewis from the Shops' opening in September 2020 until December 2022, when they opted to close the store after the birth of their first child earlier in the year. They wrote at the time that "there weren't enough hours in the day" for parenthood, small business ownership, and full-time jobs as public school teachers.

On his campaign website, McAfee writes that he attended Jenks Public Schools and Victory Christian School, is a deacon at First Presbyterian Church, and moved south so that their children could attend Jenks Southeast Elementary where he went to school. His website does not list his current employment, but a Facebook post indicates he is a Community School Coordinator for the Union Public Schools 6th Grade Center, which is confirmed on the Union district website and the 6th Grade Center website. His wife Kelsey is a Career Connect advisor for Union High School.

McAfee's bookshop began as a pop-up at Mother Road Market, won a competition to get one of the spaces in the Shops at Mother Road Market, then received funding from a Kiva loan under the trusteeship of the Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation. According to this Tulsa Kids article, Eleanor's Bookshop was named to honor Eleanor Roosevelt. McAfee has yet to file a contribution and expenditures report, but I have a suspicion that former Democrat Mayor Kathy Taylor's name will be on it. The bookshop's Facebook feed often highlighted children's books written from a progressive perspective, such as this Election Day 2020 post advertising Jill Biden's children's book about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's Superheroes Are Everywhere and a post promoting a book featuring the poem read at Biden's inauguration. Does this represent McAfee's personal politics, or was it a facade to ingratiate himself with his landlord and benefactor?

Based on Scott Gaspar's testimonial and Dr. Baker's many years of experience in vocational education, and in light of indications of his opponent's leftward leanings, I'd vote to re-elect Dr. Jim W. Baker to the Tulsa Tech board.

Posted a few minutes ago on Facebook by Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnell:

Lisa and I decided to not run for Governor because we were ready for a new chapter outside politics. While the announced developments in our congressional delegation opened up that conversation again the past few days, it has not changed how we feel about pursuing something new outside of politics. I will not be a candidate for any elected public office this year. Serving the state as Lieutenant Governor has been an incredible honor, and we're excited about a new season in our family's life when my term is finished.

Pinnell is one of those rare politicians that has managed not to diminish his popularity after eight years in office. The usual way to exercise stewardship of political capital is to use it to gain higher office, where greater impact is possible, but there are other ways, and it will be interesting to see what that looks like for Pinnell.

Oklahoma State Question 836 will not appear on the Oklahoma ballot. The initiative petition fell short of the required number of signatures.

From the Oklahoma Secretary of State website:

Initiative petition 448 filed January 3, 2025; SC order 2025 OK 56 - Laws in effect as of 11/2024 will apply-SB1027 (2025) will not be applied to SQ836; 42 boxes of signed petition pamphlets timely filed 01/26/2026 on behalf of IP448; SOS Petition verification process concluded March 3, 2026; SOS filed the required signature verification report with the Supreme Court March 5, 2026; The total number of signatures verified, with unique matches to the Oklahoma Public Voter Registration file for Initiative Petition 448, is 142,567.

The signature threshold for initiative petitions for a constitutional amendment, defined in Article V, Section 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution, is 15% of the number of votes cast in the last regular general election for Governor. That's 1,153,284 * 15% = 172,993. According to the report filed yesterday by Oklahoma Secretary of State Benjamin Lepak with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the petitions filed contained only 142,567 validated signatures. (The verification report is page 98 of the SQ 836 file.)

The vast bulk of disqualified signatures were the 57,841 signature lines which "did not match 4 of 5 data points in the Oklahoma Public Voter Registration file." 27.6% of the 209,616 signatures that were submitted failed to meet this simple test. HB 3826 (2020 Regular Session) added a verification requirement to 34 O.S. 2: "The following five data points shall be included on the form: the voter's legal first name, legal last name, zip code, house number and numerical month and day of my birth.... In order for the signature to be approved by the Secretary of State, three or more data points described in subsection A of this section must be matched to the voter registration file." SB 518 (2024 Regular Session) increased the threshold to four data points out of five. So if a registered voter who signed the petition managed to correctly write down his legal first and last name, birthday, and house number, but got the zip code wrong, the signature would be considered valid. The process does not appear to require that the signature itself matches the signature on your voter registration form.

Another 9,208 signatures (4.4%) were (in decreasing order) duplicates (5,761), undated (1,746), non-residents (1,006), not registered to vote (516), signed outside of the petition-gathering period (163), or unsigned (16). Another 205 pages, containing a potential 1,845 names, were discarded because the circulator didn't provide a complete address or any address at all or didn't sign the sheet or because the notary information was incomplete.

If a similar proportion of signatures had been disqualified, it may be that some of our most nefarious initiative petitions would have never made the ballot. If just 3% of SQ 788 (Medical Marijuana) signatures had been invalidated, it would have fallen short of the lower threshold required for a statutory initiative. The file for SQ 832 (escalating minimum wage) does not indicate that the signatures were cross-checked in the manner required by HB 3826 and if so, how many were disqualified. SQ 832 was filed before SB 518 went into effect, so only the threshold would have been only three of five data points matching the voter file. SQ 832 was also not required to meet the geographical distribution requirements of SB 1027 (2025) which limits the proportion of signatures that can be collected from large counties.

An organization called Oklahoma United was behind the push for SQ 836. Its founder and CEO, Margaret Kobos, was an attorney with Frederic Dorwart Lawyers and before that was an executive at the Bank of Oklahoma, two key nodes of George Kaiser's philanthropocratic network.

I won't be surprised if there is a legal challenge to this outcome. I would expect future petition efforts to scrutinize their own petitions and conduct their own matching process in order to have an accurate running count of valid signatures.

Rick Carpenter, who led the Taxpayer Bill of Rights petition effort, commented that "the new petition rules have made the initiative petition a quaint remembrance of the past." SB 1027 (2025), which sets geographical limits to require a proportion of signatures to come from outside metro areas, did not apply to SQ 836, but that will be an added burden on future petition efforts. Carpenter is very glad that we won't get 836's proposed jungle primaries, but he mourns the practical end of the people's ability to bypass the legislature. He thinks the tight timeline, the high threshold, and the geographical limits make it impractical to get a proposition on the ballot through an initiative petition.

I think with the new petition circulation laws, the initiative petition is dead. Actually making law has been stripped from the hands of the people and is completely the purview of the legislature now.

You have to pay the circulators, there is no way to collect a couple hundred thousand signatures in the 90 days allowed with people doing it in their spare time.

I think the new law also prevents you from paying circulators by the signature. That will definitely result in an extremely inefficient allocation of resources.

In 90 days, you don't have time to run around the state. Limiting access to the state's largest population centers is prohibitive.

20 years ago I ran the Taxpayer Bill of Rights petition. We had to collect 220,000 signatures and we managed to get a little over 300,000. We would not have gotten half that number had access to the largest population centers of the state been limited.

The Secretary of State disallowed 85,000 signatures to leave us just under the number needed. Not because the signatures were bad, but by disqualifying the circulators. This state is very hostile toward the initiative petition process. The legislature doesn't like to share their lawmaking prerogative.

If you're gonna make people run around the state to collect signatures, they need more like six months.

Rick Carpenter's essay from 2009 is worth reading if you want to understand the practicalities of an initiative petition and all the legal obstacles to succeeding.

I will note that SQ 832, as terrible as it is, is a statutory proposal -- that is, it would only change a statute, which could later be changed by the legislature -- and so only had to meet the 8% threshold, about half the signatures required for a constitutional amendment, which it did by a wide margin.

We're blessed to have been spared a dangerous but facially benign, and badly structured, constitutional amendment from appearing on the ballot, where dark money spending could have pushed it across the line. As I explained in my earlier article, the proposed constitutional amendment illustrated the hazards of legislation that hasn't gone through the polishing process of committee hearings. It wasn't customized to speak to the specifics of the language in the Oklahoma Constitution and statutes, and it had a severability clause, which has no business in the State Constitution. It would have spawned dozens of court cases over conflicts with other laws that were not specifically repealed.

But there still needs to be a way for citizens to bypass the legislature. Perhaps a better approach would be to require constitutional amendments to pass by a super-majority, or to receive a majority of the vote in a super-majority of State House or State Senate districts -- the kind of geographical distribution needed for a legislative amendment to move forward.

Tuesday, February 10, 2026, is the primary election date for any Oklahoma school board elections with three or more candidates. (Two-candidate elections, like the Tulsa Public School District 4 and District 7 races, have a bye and will appear on the April 7, 2026, school general election ballot.)

The complete list of elections is here. You can use the Oklahoma Voter Portal to see if you are voting tomorrow, check your polling place, and look at a sample ballot.

There are 415 independent (K-12) school districts in Oklahoma, 91 elementary (K-8) districts, and 29 technology center (CareerTech) districts, and every one of those 535 districts has a school board term expiring this year, but only 13 of those elections drew three or more candidates.

• Asher (McClain, Pontotoc, Pottawatomie)
• Chouteau-Mazie (Mayes, Rogers, Wagoner)
• Drumright (Creek, Payne)
• Grandfield (Cotton, Tillman)
• Hobart (Kiowa)
• Keys (Cherokee)
• Moffett (Sequoyah)
• Moss (Hughes)
• Okay (Wagoner)
• Rush Springs (Grady)
• Seiling (Dewey, Major, Woodward)
• Silo (Bryan)
• South Coffeyville (Nowata)
• Wilson (Carter, Love)

Two more seats have elections to fill unexpired terms:

• Central (Sequoyah)
• Metro Tech Center (Oklahoma)

It's pretty funny for advocates of top-two jungle primaries (SQ 836) to complain about turnout and participation in legislative and statewide elections while saying nothing about school board elections, which have exactly the system they want to impose on the entire state with even lower turnout and few candidates.

In these primaries, a candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote is elected; otherwise, the top two candidates advance to the April 7, 2026, general election.

There are more school bond issues than school board seats up for a vote: 28 districts (only one in Tulsa County) have at least one bond issue proposition on the ballot.

Jenks school district has two bond issue propositions totalling $20,300,000. According to the Bond Disclosure, Jenks Public Schools Proposition No. 1 asks for $19,640,000.00 for buildings and equipment, while Proposition No. 2 seeks $660,000.00 for student transportation equipment. Proponents claim that property taxes will not increase if the propositions are approved, but taxes would certainly decrease if the propositions are defeated. The biggest items on the list are $5.9 million for "Tennis Facility Upgrades," $3.71 million for "technology equipment district wide," and $2.6 million for "Frank Herald Fieldhouse Expansion and Renovation."

There are other matters up for a vote tomorrow.

House District 35 voters will choose between Democrat college teacher Luke Kruse and Republican rancher Dillon Travis to fill the seat vacated by Ty Burns (R-Pawnee).

Burns resigned effective October 1. Burns pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors for incidents of domestic abuse and assault involving family members in November 2024 and April 2025. He received a one-year suspended sentence and must complete a 52-week Batterer's Intervention Program. Rep. Burns was one of the more moderate Republicans in the Legislature, earning a 67% cumulative average on the Oklahoma Conservative Index for the five years he served.

House 35 is centered on Pawnee County, with sections of bordering counties (Payne, Creek, Noble, Osage). Sadly, the Republican nominee is the CAMP candidate (as was Ty Burns) and is attracting significant PAC money. (CAMP is the RINO campaign consultancy that supported Democrat Karen Keith's 2024 campaign for Tulsa mayor.) The seat will be up for election again this fall. Were the Democrat to win this special election by some fluke, Republican voters could nominate a grassroots conservative in June without having to defeat a well-funded PAC-backed incumbent in the primary.

Oklahoma City Council chairman David Holt, who wants to Californicate Oklahoma, is up for re-election, with one challenger, Matthew Pallares. The part-time at-large seat on the council, also known as "mayor," has no executive authority under OKC's council-manager form of government; the City Manager, hired by the whole Council, is the CEO of city government. If elected, Pallares hopes to direct more attention and support toward neglected areas of the city.

Several other cities and towns have municipal elections including Collinsville, Pawhuska, Sapulpa, Norman, Midwest City, Muskogee, Okmulgee, Pryor Creek, Ponca City, Hugo, Ada, Krebs, Seminole, Sallisaw, Wewoka, Alva, Durant, Yukon, Purcell, Walters, and Mangum.

Bartlesville has five propositions on the ballot: Propositions 1 through 3 are general obligation bond issues, which would increase property tax rates. Here is a list of all the bond issue projects. Proposition 4 extends the 1/4-cent economic development sales tax for five years. Proposition 5 extends the 1/2-cent capital improvement program sales tax for five years. If the propositions are defeated, the sales taxes would expire on June 30, 2026; if passed they will be extended until June 30, 2031.

• PROPOSITION NO. 1, FIRE FIGHTING APPARATUS PROJECT
• PROPOSITION NO. 2, STREET AND BRIDGE PROJECTS
• PROPOSITION NO. 3, PARKS AND RECREATIONAL FACILITIES PROJECTS
• PROPOSITION NO. 4, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM SALES TAX EXTENSION (ordinance with list of projects)
• PROPOSITION NO. 5, CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM (CIP) SALES TAX EXTENSION (ordinance)

The City of Cushing is re-voting on five city charter amendments:

Voters will consider five propositions addressing updates to the Charter. These topics were previously approved by voters in 2024; however, due to a technical issue with notification procedures, those results were invalidated. To honor the will of the voters, the topics are being presented again.

The proposed amendments will modernize the City Charter and eliminate inconsistencies with State Law.

Three counties are voting on sales taxes. Johnston County is voting on a five-year extension to its 1-cent sales tax, 63% of which goes to general county government.

Shall the resolution of the Board of County Commissioners of Johnston County relating to:

Levying an excise (sales) tax of one percent (1%) upon the gross proceeds from all sales to any person taxable under the sales tax law of Oklahoma, providing for administration and collection of tax; requiring filing of returns; providing for interest and penalties for failure to pay tax when due; providing for refund of erroneous payments; requiring taxpayer to keep records, vendors to collect tax from purchaser at the time of sale, and establishing liens; making tax cumulative; defining items, providing severability or provisions; pledging the monthly income of the revenue of said tax to the General Fund for a period of five (5) years, beginning January 1, 2027 & ending December 31, 2031 as follows:

Emergency Services: City & Rural Fire Protection 6%, Ambulance Service 8%, Civil Defense 4%, Sheriff's Reserves 1%, General to Emergency Services 1%; Community Services: OSU Extension & 4-H 8%, Counseling, Inc. 1%, County Free Fair 2%, Senior Citizens 4%, General to Community Services 2%; General County Government: Courthouse Maintenance & Operation 16%, Support of County Offices 40%, General to County Government 7%

Be approved by the electors of Johnston County?

Latimer County will vote on a permanent 1/4-cent sales tax:

Shall a 1/4 cent sales tax in Latimer County by the Latimer County Government continue perpetually for the establishment, maintenance and operation of County Government, Latimer County Solid Waste and Latimer County 911 be approved by the people and divided as follows: 1/8 to Latimer County General Fund; 1/16 to Latimer County Solid Waste Trust Authority; 1/16 to Latimer County 911

Woodward County has a single sales-tax proposition that looks like it should be two separate issues, making a 1/10th-cent tax permanent and extending a 3/10th-cent tax for 15 years. Some civic-minded county resident ought to challenge this in court, because it blatantly violates the single-subject rule in the Oklahoma Constitution.

Shall a proposition of Woodward County, Oklahoma, making permanent, with no tax increase, one-tenth (1/10) of one (1) percent of the existing County sales tax for general government purposes, including, but not limited to, jail operations and maintenance, courthouse operations, public safety, and all other lawful functions for the benefit of the County; and extending three-tenths (3/10) of one (1) percent of the existing sales tax for a period of fifteen (15) years, with no tax increase, for qualified economic development and community facilities purposes including, but not limited to, matching funds for state and federal grants, electrical, water and sewer upgrades, road and bridge improvements, fire and EMS service support, promotion, retention, and expansion of business and industry, and all other projects that promote economic growth for the benefit of the County; providing for all revenues to be administered by the Board of County Commissioners and subject to annual budgeting, audit, and public reporting, as authorized by Title 68 O.S. §1370; and authorizing the pledging of sales tax revenues for the payment of principal and interest on any indebtedness incurred by or on behalf of the County, if applicable, be approved?

UPDATE with RESULTS: The lowest turnout election across the state was in the Town of Kendrick in Lincoln County. All 8 voters (out of about 60 registered) voted in favor of granting ONG a 25-year franchise to provide natural gas.

Most school bond issues passed. Jenks's passed with about 83% for each proposition, but turnout was just under 4% of registered voters. Democracy!

School bond issues in Bridge Creek (Grady County), Canton (Blaine), and Locust Grove (Mayes) managed a majority but fell short of the 60% threshold for passage. One of the two school bond issues Hulbert (Cherokee County) ended in a tie vote; the other broke 50% but fell short of the 60% threshold.

School bond issues in Marietta (Love), McAlester (Pittsburg), Meeker (Lincoln), Merritt (Beckham), and Weatherford (Custer) districts didn't even get 50% of the vote, with some failing by 40%-60% or worse.

McAlester Public Schools was seeking $4.7 million for a 12,000 sq. ft. STEM building, to house robotics and aerospace programs and also serve as a safe room. To their credit, they published a detailed cost estimate prepared by Crossland Construction. But the bond issue would have increased property taxes by 9%, which is substantial and probably explains the defeat. From the Bond Transparency disclosure, it looks like voters approved a $27,430,000 bond issue in 2021 for a new classroom and multipurpose building (Activities Center), but those bonds have not actually been issued, and additional bond elections in 2024 and 2025 approved a total of $3,090,000 for "windows, glass, glazing and storefronts" and "drywall" for the same building; those bonds were issued. Seems odd -- will have to dig further.

Weatherford was asking voters for an eye-popping $201 million to pay for a brand-new high school campus, plus converting the existing high school into the middle school. This would have amounted to a 10% property tax increase. The bond would have been repaid over 24 years, and the majority of the bond issue revenue would go to interest and fees. The actual project cost was only $82 million.

Ryan Michael Lowe won the Muskogee mayor's race by 11 votes over James Robert Gulley. 86% of Oklahoma City voters decided to let David Holt pretend to be important for another 4 years, but turnout was only just over 10%, despite using an election method that Holt swears will be more democratic and improve voter turnout.

All of Bartlesville's tax propositions passed with 70% or better. All three county taxes passed by wide margins.

A flock of very aggressive petition circulators have been accosting shoppers in parking lots over the last month or so, trying to meet the signature requirement to put State Question 836 on the Oklahoma ballot. The deadline for signature collection is in the next few days.

They call SQ 836 an initiative petition for open primaries, but that isn't accurate. Texas and other states have open primaries by virtue of the fact that they don't have party registration for voters. In Texas, each election year you decide before the primary date in March whether you will take the Republican, Democrat, or some other party ballot, and that limits you to that party for the rest of the year, but you could choose to take a different party's ballot the following year.

SQ 836 would set up a jungle primary, in which all voters (all who bother to show up) would choose from all candidates of all parties in a single primary. If no candidate gets a majority of the vote, the top two candidates, regardless of party, would advance to a runoff. The only difference between this and the City of Tulsa's non-partisan elections is that party labels could appear on the ballot.

Under the SQ 836 system, the general election (really a runoff) would only offer the voters two choices. There would be no third-party candidates, no independent candidates, no option even for a protest vote against the top two.

It's a bad idea that sounds very small-d democratic. An example of how it goes wrong is the governor's race in Louisiana in 1991: Several reasonable candidates (including incumbent governor Buddy Roemer) split the majority of the vote in the primary, so that the top two to advance to the general were Edwin Edwards, a crooked former governor who had lost the 1987 election, who had already been tried for corruption, and who would later serve time in prison for racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud, and wire fraud, and David Duke, a former Klan Grand Wizard. There was a popular bumper sticker at the time that read, "Vote for the Crook. It's important." Because it was a top-two runoff, voters had no other options, no independent or third-party candidates to choose from, no way to cast a protest vote.

Wikipedia's description of that election:

The first round primary gubernatorial contest included Roemer, Edwin Edwards, David Duke, and Eighth District Congressman Holloway who all ran in Louisiana's open primary. Roemer was wounded by his mistakes as governor, while Edwards and Duke each had a passionate core group of supporters. Roemer placed third in the primary. One of the contributing factors to his defeat was a last-minute advertising barrage by Marine Shale owner Jack Kent; Marine Shale had been targeted by the Roemer administration as a polluter, and Kent spent $500,000 of his own money in the closing days of the campaign to purchase anti-Roemer commercials.

Had Holloway not run, Roemer likely would have finished second and given voters a sensible choice in the runoff. The SQ 836 system is very sensitive to spoiler candidates, who, with some dark-money backing, could win enough support to take out all the reasonable choices in the race.

Average voters who have been seduced by SQ 836 believe that they'll have as many choices as they do today. But nothing is static, and these changes will push parties to return to the proverbial "smoke-filled rooms." As a strategic matter, parties would develop private processes to select a party-backed nominee to represent the party on the ballot, in order to avoid splitting the majority party's vote among several candidates and allowing the other party to win with a tiny minority. To enforce this unity, parties would have to impose penalties on any party member who files for office without the party's endorsement. This is the system used in the UK; the nomination process is entirely private.

SQ 836 is a massive, two-page-long constitutional amendment, an awkward add-on that would be called "Article 3A." That link will take you to the actual language that the petition-backers wants to stick into the Oklahoma Constitution. The details of Oklahoma's election processes are currently set out in statute, where they can be adjusted by legislation over time. SQ 836 would write processes in stone. Even if you wanted something like SQ 836's system, but saw some minor changes you'd want to make, you wouldn't have the power.

This massive constitutional amendment is generic, developed by its out-of-state promoters, and it doesn't plug in neatly to the language used elsewhere in Oklahoma's constitution. It even has a severability clause, for pete's sake, which means the authors of SQ 836 expect that some aspects of it will be thrown out by courts; who knows what will survive? Voters and candidates will have to live with uncertainty while challenges move through the courts, and whatever does survive court challenges will be extremely hard to change however mutilated it may be.

Backers say we need this because there are too many elections decided in Republican primaries because no Democrats, Libertarians, or independents bother to file for office. There's an obvious remedy that doesn't require a constitutional amendment: File for office, and be sane enough to appeal to voters.

Back in the 1970s, when my family lived in Wagoner County, there were many county offices that were decided without any input from my parents, who were rare registered Republicans in that heavily Democrat county. That was the norm all over Oklahoma as recently as the 1970s, but the situation has completely flipped, without the help of constitutional amendments that change the election system. Republicans started running for those offices, and voters, who were already voting for Republicans over the loony leftist Democrats at the Federal level, started voting for Republicans at the county and local level. 1964 was the last time that Oklahoma gave its electoral votes to a Democrat, but it wasn't until the 2000s that Republicans gained majorities in the legislature, and it was the 2010s before the GOP became dominant in county government.

There's a lot more that could and has been said. OCPA has a lot of material on SQ 836 on their website. OCPA has also set up a website to urge Oklahomans NOT to sign the 836 petition: DeclineToSign.com

If you signed the petition for SQ 836 and have come to regret it, there is a way to rescind your signature. There is a form from the Secretary of State's office that you will need to fill out, then sign in front of a notary public (UPS Stores and banks usually have a notary), then submit in person or by mail to the Secretary of State's office in Oklahoma City. Withdraw of Signature Affidavit - Statewide Petitions - oksos2025.pdf. Here are the instructions:

1. Please provide your name, address and county information, as it appears on your voter registration record.
2. Must identify and state the petition number and state question number for signature removal [Petition Number 448, State Question 836]
3. Along with the date the petition was signed
4. Execute/Sign your affidavit, in witness of an Oklahoma Notary Public (only handwritten, original signatures are accepted).
5. Notary public must fully execute their witness statement accordingly.
6. Then, please mail or deliver in person your original (copies are not accepted), fully executed affidavit to:

Oklahoma Secretary of State
Exec/Leg Division - Statewide Petitions
Oklahoma State Capitol Bldg.
2300 N. Lincoln Blvd., Ste. 122
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73105

No Republican elected official has come out in support of SQ 836. David Holt, a former Republican state senator who now serves a part-time non-partisan position as chairman of the Oklahoma City Council, is its most prominent supporter.

The filing period for the 2026 Oklahoma school board elections begins Monday, December 1, 2025, and ends Wednesday, December 3, 2025. Candidates file at the election board of the county which contains the district; for districts that extend into neighboring counties, candidates file in the county in which the school district headquarters is located. Across Oklahoma, every geographical K-12 (independent) school district, K-8 (elementary) school district, and technology center district has at least one seat up for election every year. Filing is open each day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The school primary election will be held on February 10, 2026, and the general election on April 7, 2026. If only two candidates file for an office, no primary will be held. If three or more candidates file, a primary will be held, and if one candidate receives more than 50% of ballots cast, that candidate is elected; otherwise, a general election will occur with the two candidates receiving the highest number of ballots in the primary.

Elementary school districts have three board members elected at-large and also elect one member every year to a three-year term. Technology Center districts have seven members with rotating seven-year terms. Independent school districts in Oklahoma (except for three) have five board members who serve five-year terms, and Ward 1 will be up for election this time around. Oklahoma City, Enid, and Tulsa districts each have seven election districts, each with a board member elected to a four-year term, and Oklahoma City also has a board chairman, elected by the entire OKCPS district to a four-year term.

I should point out for those new to our state that in Oklahoma school district government is completely disconnected from county or municipal government. Although school districts often take the name of the city or town where they're headquartered, their boundaries do not align with municipal boundaries, and the City of [Place] has no involvement in the management and operation of [Place] Public Schools.

In the Tulsa Technology Center district, the term of District 7 board member Dr. Jim Baker is expiring. District 7 covers the southernmost part of the Tulsa Tech district, including all of Liberty, Glenpool, and Bixby school districts, the bulk of the Jenks school district, and portions of Union and Broken Arrow districts.

This year, two Tulsa Public School board seats are up for election: District 4, held by conservative Republican E'Lena Ashley, and District 7, held by progressive Democrat Susan Lamkin, the current board president. In 2022, Ashley conducted a door-to-door, grassroots campaign to defeat the incumbent, while Lamkin prevailed in a high-dollar battle against former District Attorney Tim Harris, a conservative Republican. District 4 is the eastern part of the TPS district (basically anything between Pine and 31st Street east of Memorial), while District 7 is the southernmost strip (roughly south of 51st between the Arkansas River and Memorial).

In most years, the vast majority of school board seats draw only one candidate. That's not surprising when the filing period falls at the beginning of the Christmas season when our energy and attention is focused elsewhere. Even if there is an election, it typically draws very low turnout. The two-month-long campaign period features short days, cold temperatures, bad weather, and holidays, all of which hinder door-to-door campaigning and volunteer availability. BatesLine has long promoted the idea of holding municipal, school district, and county elections in the fall of odd-numbered years, with two-year terms for every school board seat. This creates a regular rhythm of election season, with statewide and federal elections alternating Novembers with local elections.

We won't know for sure who's running until the close of filing. In state elections, you could often get advance notice by seeing which candidates for a given race had filed a Statement of Organization form with the State Ethics Commission, required within 10 days of your campaign spending or receiving in excess of $1,000.

Soon, we'll be able to do that for school and municipal races as well. SB 890, authored by Sen. Julie Daniels and passed unanimously in both houses this past session, moves reporting for county, municipal, independent school district boards, and technology center boards to the State Ethics Commission. The changes in the law went into effect on November 1. (Daniels, a Republican, represents Senate District 39, covering Washington & Nowata Counties and northern Rogers County.)

That's good news for the public, as we'll no longer have to file an open records request with the school board clerk and pray for a timely response. Eventually, we'll be able to search for all reports on a given school board race on the web, with no gatekeeper. Rather than request filings from various county election boards, city and town clerks, and school district clerks, rather than having to decipher and digitize handwritten reports, we'll be able to search online through electronically filed reports for nearly every elected office in the state.

But not quite yet. The State Ethics Commission has been rolling out a desperately needed update to their online filing and search website, known as Guardian. Guardian 2.0 is in beta-test, and the Ethics Commission has prioritized the tools needed for campaign committees, lobbyists, and elected officials to file required reports, but the public search functions are not yet operational. The Ethics Commission website advises: "Campaign finance information remains available by request until public reporting tools are fully enabled [by emailing] ethics@ethics.ok.gov." Keep in mind that some school board candidates may have filed Statements of Organization for this election with the district clerk prior to the new law taking effect.

For now, we'll have to look to public announcements and the daily report from the election board to track who has filed for next year's school board races.