The November race for Oklahoma’s 3rd Congressional District, which spills out of the Panhandle and fills the western half of the state, is rated a “safe Republican” contest by the Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call. Thus, the Republican primary, in June, was the de facto election. The district elected Democrats through most of the 20th century, but current GOP Representative Frank Lucas has robust financial support and the backing of constituents, which means he’s entrenched in his seat.
Engineer Frankie Robbins ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. Though he is a member of a United Methodist Church and has a son named Christian, he’s a token candidate in Oklahoma’s right-of-center body politic, in which religion is a necessary, though insufficient, condition.
But in 2012, Robbins ran in the Democratic primary and lost to a candidate who garnered 53 percent of the vote. That candidate, a first-time politician named Timothy Ray Murray, went on to receive about 20 percent of the district’s vote in the November election. Lucas took more than 75 percent of the vote. But, Murray raised only $507 for his campaign, an amount that’s a mere rounding error in Lucas’ seven-figure budget. The result means that 53,472 Oklahoma voters cast their ballots for Murray to represent them.
Murray, a mustachioed family man from Moore, Oklahoma, switched parties to contest Lucas in the 2014 Republican primary. He garnered 5.2 percent of the vote. Days after getting walloped by Lucas, the incumbent who received nearly 83 percent of the Republican primary vote, Murray sent a news release to local media announcing his intent to contest the election. Murray is privy to classified information that is “widely known,” according to the release—namely, that his opponent is no longer living.
Murray says that Frank Lucas was executed in southern Ukraine by the World Court in 2011, and that a robotic body double has replaced the real Lucas. Therefore, because one must be a human to hold office, Murray meets the requirements for election and should acquire the votes cast for Lucas.
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According to a copy of timothyraymurray.com archived on July 4,[1] in a section that did not appear in the three-link header along the left column of the site, Murray was sworn to duty as an ambassador of the people by then-President Gerald Ford. The “About” section of Murray’s archived website says that in 1978, he was a youth diplomat for the United States to the United Nations, where he was awarded “United Nations Humanitarian Expert status.” Gerald Ford’s presidency ended in 1977. Murray is 47 in 2014, which means he was born in either 1966 or 1967. He would have been between the ages of seven and 11 when Ford made him ambassador.
The position, though it does not pay well—or at all—comes with important duties. For example, Murray[2] “[r]equested and obtained in 2013, Protection from partial or whole life placement on Starship without the knowledge and or will of any person(s) on Earth or in Space, and the storage of partial human size life on Earth or in this Solar system.” Similarly, Murray procured “removal, from humans, of an illegal de-human chip from persons abroad and in armed forces use. Helped block the 7th day Legislation in the ‘70’s that would put the 666 de-human chip in every person on earth.”
He also alleges in the press release that the U.S. Defense Department has his DNA, and speculates that Congress wants him to say that the use of his DNA “will not result in benefits to people I have never had relations with of a family nature.”
His other accomplishments as ambassador trend toward the macroeconomic: He helped prevent a toxic oil deal after Desert Storm, used “strong arm leverage” to eschew an agreement with Japan that would have damaged the technology market, engineered the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and secured a number of stimulus initiatives dating back to the Ford administration.
In the social-issues sphere, Murray protected the rights of American minorities to hold public office. Though his “About” page holds that Murray supports the separation of church and state, he claims to have ensured that public schools cannot stop students from exercising their religious right to prayer.
When he’s not serving as an ambassador, Murray’s site reveals that he has also been influential in the corporate sector. The archived site says that he graduated from the Oklahoma City branch of Oklahoma State University with an associate’s degree in electronics engineering technology. The site says that his professional experience has been in large pharmacy chains and other corporate business markets, and alleges that he has been instrumental in turning around three different businesses, though they are not mentioned by name. Murray did not respond to repeated phone and email requests for an interview. For someone with extensive experience in corporate turnaround, Murray’s campaigns are far from solvent. FEC records show that Tim Murray for Congress received $507 in 2012 while accumulating $17,506 in debt. Murray’s final FEC filing for 2014 revealed his committee received $1 in net donations and incurred $9188.55 of debt.
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Murray is soft-spoken and completely bald. He wears dark, practical suits with high lapels, giving him a Dr.-Evil-meets-a-mortician look. He’s nervous on camera, which manifests within a minute of his 2012 interview with Tulsa’s KJRH about his candidacy. Sitting with his hands in his lap as the interviewer gesticulates, “implementation” and “implication” become one muddled word. His small eyes are almost black and his hirsute mustache is slightly concave, ending at his lower lip.
The political goals listed on Murray’s site include, among other concerns: balancing the budget and reducing national debt; reforming taxation for “Equal and Fair” tax policies; protecting agriculture to reclaim America’s global market share; and providing market protection for small businesses and banks.
In the clip, Murray sticks to the Affordable Care Act (as a Democratic candidate, he supported it at the time) and import taxes.
Murray’s bio from 2012 says he has three children. His oldest daughter is married and is the mother of Murray’s two grandchildren. Her husband has been Murray’s oft-negligent campaign treasurer since Murray began running for office in 2012. He has another daughter who was engaged at the time, and his youngest son was a junior in high school. In 2011, a donation to the campaign was made from Timothy Murray’s home address by a Tony Murray. It was made out for $1.
Moore is in the 4th Congressional District. On August 23, 2013, Murray filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission to run as a Republican for the U.S. House seat in the 5th Congressional District, which is centralized and spills out of Oklahoma City. But on February 8, 2014, Murray amended his bid, closing his 5th District candidacy to again aim for Lucas’ 3rd Congressional District seat. After running as a Democrat in 2012, he would challenge Lucas in the 2014 Republican primary.
Lucas has been a U.S. representative for 20 years, and has held elected office in Oklahoma since 1988. He’s survived the elimination of his original district and raised more than $5 million cumulatively for his campaigns. He’s currently the chairman of the House Agricultural Committee.
Despite Murray’s sterling record of accomplishment, Oklahoma primary voters seem to have refuted him in favor of Lucas, who fetched the resounding majority of votes. Granted, Lucas spent more than $1 million; Murray raised a $50 war chest. But Murray also trailed behind second-place Robert Hubbard by nearly seven percentage points. Hubbard’s campaign website says he is a rancher, pastor, and construction-company owner who is the GOP chairman of Canadian County, which bills itself as “the reddest county in the reddest state.”
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Lucas’ camp told the press that he is very much alive and that he has never been to Ukraine. To be fair, that’s exactly what they would say if Murray’s allegations were true and Lucas is a clandestine robotic imposter. But, it’s important to report both sides of the story.
The current iteration of timothyraymurray.com is one page of text that’s one paragraph long. A statement says that Murray “will continue legal correction through the Federal Courts and possibly Oklahoma Courts as needed to correct to voter selected Representation.”
The state deadline to contest the eligibility of a candidate was April 15. Murray did not contest the eligibility of the opponent he says is not human. The deadline for challenging the results of an election was on June 27. In documents provided by the Oklahoma State Election Board, “The Hon. Timothy Ray Murray,” in a filing made on his own behalf without legal representation, sent a five-page email to the Osage County Election Board on June 26.
In that filing, Murray says he attended the funeral of the real Frank Lucas and “talked to his family beside his casket on or about September 25, 2007 in Oklahoma City.” In this version of events, it was not the real Lucas who was hung in 2011 by the World Court in Ukraine, but the look alike, who had Lucas’ life experiences downloaded to his brain. In the original press release posted on his website, Murray did not mention a 2007 funeral, but said that the original Frank Lucas’ death was in Ukraine via hanging. Murray gave no motive for either Lucas or his look alike “being hung by the neck till death on a white stage in southern Ukraine.”
He writes that he ran against Lucas in the 1998 primary and received a preponderance of votes, but the congressional committee interfered and deemed Lucas the winner. There is no record of Murray running for office in 1998; 2012 was Murray’s first official candidacy, according to FEC filings.
Murray alleges that votes were switched in his election campaign against Lucas in 2012 and in the 1998 primary, and that it is “certainly probable” that votes were switched during the 2014 primary.
But State Election Board Public Information Officer Bryan Dean said in an email that Murray did not file the legally required paperwork to challenge the election. He filed his challenge to Osage County, but any contest of election must be filed to the State Election Board, which had a deadline to contest results of 5 p.m. on June 27. Murray’s appeal will not be considered.
On the final page of the appeal, Murray affirmed the veracity of his account: “Being of sound mind and body, I swear the above Petition under penalty of perjury is true and correct to the best of my ability.”
Footnotes
1. Days after he decided to challenge the election, Murray pared down his site to a truncated one-page announcement about the legal measures he vowed to take. The headline of the page is “Coming Soon.”
2. All quotes from Murray’s website have been faithfully transcribed, including grammatical errors and syntactical oddities.
Originally published in This Land, Vol. 5, Issue 19, October 1, 2014.