Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Did Lost Codes Compromise the Election?

Election results of the 2023 Memphis city election are due to be certified by the Election Commission on Monday, October 16th, but there is a middling-sized controversy about the outcome.

Chief objector so far is one Jerred Price, the entrepreneur, activist, and entertainer who, most recently,  was a candidate for City Council in Super District 8, Position 3.

Price lost that election, or so the numbers indicate. In a multi-candidate race, he came up third behind Brian Harris and the winner, Yolanda Cooper-Sutton, whose campaign was, to say the least, low-profile.

But wait a minute! Price, who is anything but bashful, is now telling anybody who will listen that the city election was compromised — and he may have a point, perhaps.

In a development that was treated more back-burner than perhaps it should have been by the media at large, a worker for the Election Commission reported a burglary of her car, which was parked in the Glenview area overnight Wednesday, October 4th.

Among the missing contents, she told police the next day — which was election day —  were $1200 in cash, as well as keys to ballot boxes and election codes. The culprit was later apprehended and the items returned, and the story was reported on WATN, Channel 24.

At the time a statement was issued by the Election Commission denying that election codes had been stolen and maintaining that “the complete integrity of the October 5th election remained in place and without compromise.”

That didn’t satisfy Price, who vented accounts of the incident on social media and questioned how it was that such items as were reported stolen were allowed out of the Election Office in the first place.

Ultimately, he would circulate what he said was an emailed response to him from County Election Coordinator Linda Phillips. In what seems an unusually chatty tone, Phillips’s message to Price went as follows [our italics added]:

“I am sure you are disappointed about your loss last week, however,  I would ask you to check your facts before you spread lies.

“While an inspector for the election had her car broken into, at no point was the election compromised in any way. Seriously, I thought you had more integrity than Trump.

And I voted for you. If you have concerns, please go to the sources of accurate information. Twitter, Facebook, and NextDoor are not primary sources.”

Asked about the comments, Phillips did not deny writing them, and Price persists in contending that Phillips and/or the Election Commission owe a fuller response to the prospect that the election might have been compromised.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Election Commission Attorney Shares Office with Voting-Machine Lobbyist

In advance of a scheduled meeting Thursday afternoon at which county Election Administrator Linda Phillips was expected to reveal her preference for a vendor of new election machines for Shelby County, proponents of hand-marked paper ballots expressed alarm over a potential link between an Election Commission lawyer and one of the vendors bidding on the county contract.

Selene McClure

plaque outside the MNA office in Nashville

The ES&S company, vendor of the controversial Diebold election machines now in use county elections and known to be a bidder for the contract on behalf of a line of devices that mark ballots by mechanical means, is represented by the lobbying firm of MNA Government Relations, which leases space in its Nashville office to the Memphis-Nashville law firm of Harris-Shelton.

Both John Ryder and Pablo Varela, attorneys for the Election Commission, are principals of the law firm, and Ryder’s name appears in tandem with that of MNA on the interactive glass register in the lobby of Nashville’s Bank of America Building. Upstairs on the 10th floor, a metal plaque outside the office door of MNA lists the two companies together, with the company name of MNA followed by a forward slash and then the name of the law firm. [See photos.]

The photographs were supplied by Selena McClure, the daughter of Erika Sugarmon, a Memphis activist, high school government teacher,  and advocate of hand-marked paper ballots.

Asked about the nexus between the two firms, Ryder said that the relationship was solely that of landlord and tenant, with Harris-Shelton leasing the space but having no involvement in the ownership of MNA and possessing no partnership with the lobbying firm. He acknowledged being a longtime friend of Wendell Moore, the senior official at MNA but said he had had no knowledge about MNA’s client base and, in particular, did not know whether that company had a client bidding for the Shelby County voting-machine contract.
Selena McClure

Nor, said Ryder,   JB

John Ryder

did he have any awareness of who the respondents were to the RFP [request-for-proposal] sent out by Phillips seeking bids on the contract.

Ryder could offer no explanation for the linking of his name — (twice; once in an apparent list of MNA employees) —— with that of the lobbying firm on the lobby register. “That’s just a mistake,” he said. He repeated that there was no working relationship between MNA and Harris-Shelton and therefore no reason for him to have made a public disclosure.

Besides being an attorney for the SCEC, Ryder has long been an eminence in the fields of law, where he specializes in bankruptcy and has won several awards for his expertise, and politics, He served in the recent past as general counsel of the Republican Party, nationwide, and was his party’s principal adviser on reapportionment matters in the wake of of the post-2010 census. He currently serves on the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority, having been appointed by President Trump.

Selene McClure

another view of the interactive lobby register in the Bank of America building

As indicated, however, advocates of voter-marked ballots are not so sanguine about the apparent relationship between Ryder’s law firm and MNA, however coincidental or incidental it might be. “All the companies bidding on the machines are entitled to be on equal footing, and the public needs to be assured that it’s getting a fair deal,” said Carol Chumney, a lawyer and former public official who favors voter-marked ballots.

Chumney said she had respect for Ryder but felt strongly that he should have made some sort of disclosure about the relationship between his law firm and MNA.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

More Voting Machines Controversy

Among the potential local casualties of the coronavirus, there is an unexpected one — the democratic process itself. At this week’s scheduled virtual meeting of the Shelby County Election Commission, the five Commissioners —three Republicans and two Democrats, in conformity with state regulations regarding majority party/minority party ratios — are primed to vote on Election Administrator Linda Phillips’ recommendations for new voting machines.

Phillips has declared that the members of the Election Commission must take a definitive up-or-down vote on the vendor, whom she will recommend from among those manufacturers who responded to an RFP (request for proposal) issued earlier by the SCEC. She has declared that the decision must come now so that the machines can be in use for August voting in the county.

For years, and for the last several months in particular, controversy has raged between activists who insist on voting machines that permit voter-marked ballots and advocates of machine-marked ballots. Phillips herself has expressed a preference for the latter type, equipped with paper-trail capability. By a narrow, party-line vote, the majority-Democratic Shelby County Commission, which must approve funding for the purchase, has expressed its own preference for hand-marked ballots.

Given the fact that Phillips’ choice of machine type is more or less predictable, and that the cost factor will be built into the selection of vendor, that will put the County Commissioners in an awkward position of having to rubber-stamp whatever choice the SCEC passes on to them.

“The process is backwards,” says GOP Election Commissioner Brent Taylor, who say,. “The Election Commission should not have initiated the RFP and passed the decision about funding on to the County Commission. What we [the Election Commission members] should have done is come to some broad general decision ab out the kind of machines we wanted and then let the County commission issue an RFP, make the choice, and then vote on the funding.”

In that regard he agrees with law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, an exponent of voter-marked paper ballots who points out further that what got skipped in the process was a promised public meeting of the Election Commission at which the public could offer input on the desirability of various types of voting machines.

Such a meeting was to have taken place in the last month or so, or in any case before a vote on the vendor was taken by the Election Commission. Or so it was announced at a February meeting of the SCEC. What intervened — and ended up scotching the meeting — was the coronavirus epidemic.

So there will be not opportunity for direct public input concerning the specifics of Phillips’ recommended purchase, a fact further complicated by the awkwardness of the virtual telemeeting process, which, in conformity with cautionary official rules against public assemblies, precludes an actual gathering with the attendant opportunity of easy back and forth interaction between Election Commissioners and the public.

GOP Election Commissioner Brent Taylor

And it seemingly assures that something of a contentious showdown will ensue at the subsequent County Commission meeting, itself convened as a telemeeting, at which funding for the ultimately selected voting machines will be on the agenda. Back when the Commission voted a preference for hand-marked paper ballots, County Commissioner Van Turner made a point of telling Phillips, who was in attendance, that the Commission had ways of exercising its disapproval of a choice.

That memorable and perhaps prophetic exchange went this way: “We can deny the funding,” said Turner. “We can sue you,” Phillips said in response.

The progress toward a new voting system has encountered other obstacles. One was a bombshell ruling by the County Commission legal staff in mid-February that state law — to wit, TCA 29-111 — forbade any purchase of new voting technology without a prior voter referendum. As County Commissioner Mick Wright noted at the time: “It’s disappointing that the state has this rule in place, that the voters would have to vote using the system we want to replace in order to have the system that we want to replace be replaced.”

The aforesaid Mulroy, however, spurred further research that eventually led the County Commission to create a capital source from existing contingency funds that could bypass the need for a referendum (and incidentally buttress the County Commission’s proprietary sense of the matter).

Another late snag, with partisan overtones, developed from a letter sent to the three GOP Election Commissioners from state Senator Byron Kesey and other Republican legislators calling for the new voting machines to involve machine-marked ballots.