By Conrad Easterday, CTCN Editor

It would have been easy for Grady County voters who turned out in droves for the 2024 presidential election to forget about a question near the bottom of the ballot — far below the president, the corporation commissioner, the congressman, the state senator, and the court justices — but they did not.
Seven out of 10 marked “yes” to approve another 10 years of an 1/8-cent sales to be shared equally among all of the county’s 20 municipal and rural fire departments. The sales tax proceeds cannot be used for firefighter pay. Departments must allocate the dollars to training and equipment without which they would eventually be in the desperate state they were in 2014 when the first sales tax was approved by voters.
The county’s many firefighters didn’t hold any election watch parties, said Kim Duke, finance/records officer for Grady County Fire, but they did keep an eye on televisions and mobile devices that Tuesday evening.
“I looked right off the bat when only two precincts were reporting in and it pretty much stayed at that same ratio all night,” Duke recalled.
Before the vote, some firefighters were confident of the outcome — and some were not, she said. The group had little funding to throw into a campaign and had to rely on media outlets to get word to voters.
One of the key points of the argument for the tax is that property owners who insure against fires get cheaper premiums when good equipment and good training increase their area’s rating with insurance providers.
“We do want to thank all the voters that supported us, and we’ll continue to be there when you need us,” Duke said. “Everybody’s just glad that we’re back for another 10 years. We’re excited to keep things going to get our ISO scores higher at every department.”
Absentee mail and early voting contributed a whopping 3,686 votes to the 17,482 total in favor of the sliver of a sales tax. Early voting was a phenomenon at polling places in all three counties — Stephens, Grady and Caddo. Secretary of the Caddo County Election Board Chelsea Bassham said her volunteers were prepared for the early onslaught, but they weren’t prepared for the stream of people to continue all day each day.
Some election watchers were disappointed in the turnout of Oklahoma voters statewide, saying less than half of registered voters went to the polls despite the success of early voting. Stephens County voters handily exceeded the halfway mark with 18,620 voters casting ballots in the presidential race compared with 28,568 total registered voters in the county.
Voters in Anadarko had their own very local race that might have gotten lost among the bigger races and issues. They elected a new mayor, John McCasland, in a special race to fill an unexpired term. McCasland won the contest without a majority, earning 717 votes to 604 for Kelley McGlothlin and 175 for Patrick Michael Hayes. The lack of a majority can trigger a runoff election in many races, but earning more than 50 percent of the total vote was not required in the mayoral election, Bassham said. (See page 4 for more county-by-county vote totals.)