Dying Texas man casts his vote after county clerk pays call

Link : http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/cpress/20041029/ca_pr_on_od/oddity_last_vote&e=4

TAHOKA, Texas (AP) - In the 10 days after Welch Flippin decided to stop dialysis and began succumbing to kidney failure, the 85-year-old Texas farmer and Second World War veteran had something on his mind. Something, he told his son, he just had to do.



He wanted to vote.


So when early voting started last week, his son went down the road to the Lynn County clerk's office in Tahoka, a one-stoplight town of nearly 2,000 people 48 kilometres south of Lubbock, and asked if he could take a ballot home to his ailing father.


The clerk offered instead to make a house call.


"In a small town, we're able to do that," county clerk Susan Tipton said Thursday. "But I've never had one that was under hospice care, so it was harder emotionally."


The next morning, she went to the house and saw Welch Flippin, a man she had known for years from his work with veterans. When he smiled and greeted her by name, she knew he was alert enough to vote. She told him he could sign with an X. But he signed his name clearly.


When she left the room to give him and his son privacy, Perry Flippin held the ballot and started asking his father, a staunch Democrat, for whom he wanted to vote.


"You like Kerry and Edwards?" Perry Flippin, retired editor of the San Angelo Standard-Times, recalled in a column in the newspaper.


"Naw," Welch Flippin replied wearily.


"Bush and Cheney?"


"Naw."


The elder Flippin answered, "Yeah" when asked whether he liked 13-term Democratic Representative Charlie Stenholm. His son marked an X for Stenholm.


Welch dozed off after that and did not talk to his son or wife again. The next day, Oct. 20, he passed away. His last conscious act was casting his vote.


Under state law, the vote will count.


"I think he knew exactly what he was doing, and I was privileged to cast that last ballot," his son said Thursday. "I'm surprised that he would be thinking about that on his death bed, but he thought his vote was important."