Worlds Apart, Living Right Next Door

Chapter Ten. The Election Official.

Dyatt (prono: d’WHY-et) Smathers is the secretary and certified election official of the Madison County Board of Elections. He’s a life long Republican and has lived in Madison County for the past 50 years. We meet at the Wagon Wheel, a restaurant off the highway just outside of Marshall. You can smell the bacon from the parking lot, and the restaurant is jam packed. Dyatt greets me, and guides me to a table towards the back. He hopes it will be quieter back there.

The coffee flows. The wait staff are super sweet. “Honey, another coffee?” And then a few minutes later, “do you want more coffee?” It was quite a lovely place to be on a Saturday morning in August.

Dyatt and I had met briefly earlier in the week at the Trusted Elections Tour, funded by the Carter Center and the North Carolina Network for Fair, Safe and Secure Elections. He was one of four election officials on the panel, and it was clear that he takes the integrity of our elections seriously and is immersed in all of the nitty and the gritty details of honoring every vote.

Dyatt is a nerd. He is happy to admit this. He loves technology, although he can get exasperated by smartphones that don’t respond swiftly enough and thumbs that can sometimes impede progress, “oh shoot, my thumb, my fingers,” when he presses the wrong option on a dropdown. He walks me through the North Carolina State Board of Elections website, how to access data on registered voters, and how they breakdown. I had not realized that the majority of voters in North Carolina are unaffiliated. They generally break Republican, this is true, but the majority of voters in North Carolina don’t have a party. He shows me the breakdown in Madison County, which sure enough, like the state is majority unaffiliated. You can find all kinds of information on the site - historical voting records, county by county and statewide, going back 20 years.

“This will suck you in,” he says with a certain amused resignation, “You will have to try to guard against that a little bit.” He makes me laugh.

He shows me how Madison County voted in the last presidential election. “We all know that Donald Trump did not win in 2020,” Dyatt says, “We all know he cried foul. Wow! But in Madison County, he won by 61% of the vote, Joe Biden got 37%, and this is back when Madison County was a heavily Democrat county.”

And it was. About 1,000 more Democrats in the county in 2020 than there were Republicans.

“It just goes to show you that rural North Carolina is fickle,” Dyatt says.

I ask him if he is worried about what could happen this year.

He is not.

“I have great confidence with the American people. They love elections,” he says. “Everybody in this room knows November the fifth’s coming. Everybody. When this vote is over here in Madison County, Karen and I are still going to be friends. She's a Democrat, I'm a Republican. We can talk about anything.” He looks around the restaurant. “Probably, if you stood the room up and said, ‘How many of you are registered?’ you’d find a lot of unaffiliated, a lot of them like me are Republicans, and some are Democrats. It's not going to come to blows here.”

Karen is the Democratic chair of the Madison County School Board. She had come over earlier to greet Dyatt and the fondness between them is clear.

Dyatt says Trump will “probably” win North Carolina, and “I'm pretty well convinced he may well win the election.” He recognizes that there may be “friction” in close races. “Whoever loses is going to say the other party cheated,” he says, and then adds, “I can prove to you that Madison County had not one extra vote in the 2020 election, not one, and in the ensuing election, I can prove to you, with the data, that nobody extra voted. And there's no disputing, when you look at that, what I just showed you, Trump won this county so convincingly, yet the Republicans were way down here in registration.”

I ask him: when Trump says he’s going to be a dictator on day one, does that worry him about future elections?

And his answer: “I think Joe Biden has proven that being the President of United States is pretty ineffective.” He brings up Biden’s efforts to forgive some student loans. “He has promised millions of college students that ‘I'm going to forgive your loans.’ He can't do that,” Dyatt says. “That takes an act of the legislative branch. It’s Congress that controls the purse.” Kamala Harris’ promise to first-time homeowners that they will receive $25,000 dollars to help with the downpayment? ”She’s not allowed to do that,” he says. “She does not control the money.”

“Am I worried about anything?,” he continues, “yeah, I am worried in America that we've actually refused to control the budget. We just spend money.”

Dyatt has been an election official for fourteen years, and I tell him I am struck by how important the election process is to him, the honor of the vote, and the integrity of the voting process. He believes Trump’s dictator comment was a “greatly misunderstood statement, something he probably should have never said.” He tells me all presidents are a dictator on day one. It’s their moment to shape the administration. “You are familiar with the wall that he started to build,” he asks me, “he’ll start that back on day one,” but, he adds, “is he going to do anything to affect these people in this room? No.”

“I’m a Christian,” he offers. “I would not want to sit down with him for the hour that you and I have spent together. I find him to be a bit of a bore. I find you to be very pleasant and easy to talk with.”

“All of these people in politics,” he says, “they are such egomaniacs,” and he asks me: “Do you know who Oprah Winfrey is?” I say that I do. “Do you know who Michelle Obama is?” I say, yes, I do.

“Michelle Obama's net worth is $70 million. Oprah Winfrey’s net worth is $3 billion. They stood on the stage of the Democrat National Convention and said, ‘don’t trust rich people, you’re gonna get them out.’” and he pauses here. “That’s ultra rich,” he says. “How can they say that with a straight face?”

“I think democracy is alive and well in America,” Dyatt tells me. “I think there's give and take, tit for tat, whatever terms you want to use.” He is troubled though about the cost of running an election. He tells me that the North Carolina governor’s race looks set to be the most expensive governor’s race in the history of the United States. “Can you imagine that? Millions of dollars just to be able to say you're the governor of the state of North Carolina? That's a little bit scary to me because, enter Elon Musk, and the people with the big pocket books.”

The Wagon Wheel is doing a roaring trade. There’s a birthday party over on one table, and plenty of family and friends gathering at other tables all around us. It’s not quiet at all. Dyatt jokes, “I think they’re trying to see who can be the loudest.”

A group of girls walk in. Dyatt points them out to me. “You look at these ladies come in here, they give you hope. They're gonna be just like you. They're gonna be smart, articulate, finding their way in the world. Good kids, boyfriends, careers ahead, moms in the making kind of stuff. I have great optimism.”

I ask him about reproductive rights and a woman’s right to autonomy over her own body.

“Being a Christian,” Dyatt says, “I think that life begins at conception. And there are places where, when the health of the mother or the baby is concerned, that has to be on the table, when it’s rape or incest, that has to be on the table, when there's severe health reasons, that has to be on the table. But let's face it, in our day and time today, in 2024, recreational sex is, you know, it's there. It's a big part of society, and there are preventative measures to keep these things from happening.” There is a place for abortion, Dyatt acknowledges, “but to use it as a termination of a baby that’s eight and a half months along, I can’t buy that.”

I don’t think most people would buy that, I say, and Dyatt agrees with me, “I don’t think most people would.”

A text pings in on Dyatt’s phone. It’s from the Republican Party. He points to his phone and says, “I get texts from the Grand Old Party all the time, asking me to send money, asking me if I will vote for Trump. Of course I will vote for Trump,” he says, and my heart sinks a little bit.

I ask him: are you voting for the party or are you voting for the candidate?

“I’m voting for the candidate,” he says.

You are somebody for whom the integrity of the vote is of paramount importance, I say, so, when Trump continues to say, to this day, ‘stop the steal,’ how does that measure up?

“Here is the issue at hand that puts me in a unique position,” Dyatt says, “I guarantee you that the state of North Carolina was done well and done correct. But because our Constitution allows every state to administer their election. I don't know what went on in Arizona … I can't tell you.”

But you do think that Biden won in 2020.

“Yeah, I do,” Dyatt says without hesitation.

So what do you make of Trump trying to undermine the election?

“Sore loser,” Dyatt says.

Addendum: Dyatt and I have been in touch since Hurricane Helene, a hurricane he describes as a “once in a lifetime disaster.” He and his family are okay but of course the community has been devastated, with some families still without access to power or water. At the time of posting, North Carolina is in its sixth day of early voting, and Dyatt tells me, “our election integrity is intact,” with record turnout across the county. “The road to recovery here in the mountains will be a long one,” he writes, “ but, the people have a strong spirit and a great deal of tenacity!!”

For those looking for ways to support the community of Madison County, today I point you to a place I didn’t get to visit while I was there, The Depot, built right beside the French Broad River, in Marshall, a gathering place for this community, a place of music. I passed by one evening on my way home, and heard the sound of bluegrass coming through the windows, but was too tired to stop. That place is gone now, literally swept away by the hurricane. Here is the gofundme to build it back.

Thank you for any support.