Tulsa attorney Colleen McCarty waited for someone to challenge Steve Kunzweiler in the race for Tulsa County district attorney.
By late January, McCarty realized no one was coming. So she talked to her family and decided to run herself.
That gave voters in Tulsa County a choice — a rarity in district attorney races.
In 23 of the 27 district attorney races in June, the lone candidate won by default. Among the four competitive races, two went to incumbents and two went to challengers.
The same scenario played out four years ago. In some districts, it’s been even longer since voters had a say in their district attorney, a position that holds significant power in the community, representing the government in criminal cases, ensuring investigations are conducted properly, reviewing evidence and determining charges.
“These races are extremely important, even if they don’t necessarily get the same type of highlight as other big races,” said Tamya Cox-Touré, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma. District attorneys decide whether to go forward with a case of simple possession, for example, or if they see large racial disparities in an arrest rate, they can monitor and investigate that on their own.
Cox-Touré said one reason the elections go uncontested is the small applicant pool.
To run, candidates for district attorney have to have lived in the state for two years, be a registered voter in and reside in the district for six months before filing. Applicants must also have been a licensed attorney for at least five years and be at least 28 years old.
Incoming Payne County district attorney Jeremiah Gregory said another deterrent may be the public scrutiny that comes with being the public face of a prosecutor’s office.
His predecessor, Laura Thomas, faced significant public scrutiny last year after people accused her office of mishandling a sexual assault case. She served as district attorney for 12 years before resigning this year.
Just running for the office can draw public scrutiny. McCarty said that during her campaign, she received death threats and was bullied online.
“There are a lot of really scary parts about being in the public these days, so I think that’s a big reason people don’t do it,” she said.
There are other reasons attorneys decide not to run. In some instances, challengers would be facing their boss. In other cases, prosecutors would be challenging someone whom they’re seeing in the courtroom.
Ten Oklahoma districts didn’t have a contested district attorney election from 2014 to 2024, according to a report by the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina School of Law released in March. Those districts had a total population of 841,254, representing 21% of Oklahoma’s total.
Only a quarter of the nation’s prosecutor elections presented voters with a choice between candidates, law professor Carissa Hessick, one of the study’s authors, found.
Her study shows that the lack of contested races isn’t just a problem in Oklahoma. The problem can be traced back to legal deserts, according to Hessick and Katie Dilks, the executive director for the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation.
A legal desert is an area that lacks access to legal resources or has fewer than one licensed attorney for every 1,000 residents. In 2023, 20 counties in Oklahoma were considered legal deserts.
District Attorney Tommy Humphries, who was appointed in 2024 and ran unopposed this year to cover Blaine, Canadian, Garfield, Kingfisher, and Grant Counties, said that the effects of COVID still linger in the legal field. It’s a challenge to find attorneys in the first place. It’s even harder to find ones that want to be prosecutors.
There are economic disadvantages to working at a rural law firm after taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Dilks said there are people who can make the economics of a typical small town practice work, but it’s hard.
She said young attorneys will look at rural practices and think that working there simply can’t pay off their loans.
Hessick, one of the authors of the UNC Prosecutors and Politics Project report, referred to this as a supply problem. When there aren’t enough qualified people to run in the first place, races go uncontested.
When races are uncontested, incumbents aren’t listed on the ballot. So people don’t see that it’s an elected office, Hessick added.
“The whole idea of running a government through democracy doesn’t work if the people don’t know who actually has to stand for election,” she said.
Some district attorneys have held their position uncontested for many years.
Gregory said he supports term limits, whether they be federally or self-imposed.
Hessick disagreed.
“I think it might create a different problem, which is that if you have a place that only has two attorneys that live there, what are you gonna do after they’ve both taken their turn?” she said.
Instead, she suggested ensuring voters are better informed by listing the district attorney on the primary and general ballots, even if they don’t have an opponent. Redistricting is another possible solution.
“We set up a system that’s supposed to make these decisions through local control and local democracy,” Hessick said. “And if that’s not working, that’s something that should make us all very, very concerned.”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
