Jayne Chandler – Memphis Flyer

Shelby County should be able to hold elections with paper-trail capabilities by August 2020. Or so opined County Election Administrator Linda Phillips last week. In a pre-election speech to a luncheon of the Kiwanis Club of Memphis at the University Club, Phillips said the county is in the process of acquiring equipment that would make possible a process combining electronic scanning with paper trail records.

Phillips said, however, that there would be disadvantages to any return to voting by paper ballot alone, a course advocated in some quarters. The chief problem, she said, would be the high rate of voter error. As an example, she said that “4 to 5 percent” of absentee ballots, which are executed on paper, contain some kind of error. “And how many elections can you recall in which the margin of victory was 5 percent or less?”

The administrator said one of the biggest challenges faced by her office is that “we don’t have enough full-time employees.” Shelby County has 18 full-time employees but needs at least 26, she said, pointing out that Davidson County (Nashville) has 29 employees to service a voting population two-thirds the size of that of Memphis. She plans to transition her office away from what she considers its present over-reliance on temporary workers.

Jackson Baker

Congressman Steve Cohen ( r) with Council endorsee Erika Sugarmon

Another need is more pollworkers, she said. Shelby County employs 1,800 pollworkers at present, but their average age is 70-something, and “each year we lose more of them.”

Asked about the efficacy of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), also called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Phillips said the county has the capability to use the method, in which voters specify their ballot choices in order of preference, so that resampling of the votes can designate a majority winner without need for a runoff.

“The biggest problem is that the city council has not given us guidelines,” she said. Shelby County voters have twice approved the process via referendum vote, and her office was prepared to use RCV in the current election, but a council majority, in tandem with the state election coordinator’s office, has by one means or another managed to forestall use of the method so far.

At some point in the future, technological advances such as facial recognition could be employed to enable voter check-ins, Phillips said. “That’s probably several decades away. That’s not because the technology isn’t there, but because it takes the legislature a long time to embrace change. Some day we’ll have it.”

• Ballot Battles (cont’d): It wouldn’t be a local election without at least one sample-ballot kerfuffle. And, sure enough, alarms have been raised, especially in local Democratic circles about a ballot being mailed to households and passed out at early-voting polls bearing the imprimatur of the “Greater Memphis Democratic Club,” a shell organization that apparently exists only to turn out sample ballots at election time.

Jackson Baker

Election Administrator Linda Phillips

The ballot in question, whose chief proprietor is entrepreneur Greg Grant, is one of several such ballots that appear at election time, and it is no secret that many, if not all, of the endorsees for office listed on them paid good money to get there.

City Council candidate John Marek, who first called public attention to the ballot last week, says, in fact, that he himself was solicited to purchase a place on the ballot and declined.

Despite being designated as being under “Democratic” auspices, the ballot features several candidates with known or suspected Republican identities — including council candidates Chase Carlisle, Ford Canale, and Worth Morgan, the latter, an incumbent, being Marek’s opponent.

Grant’s sample ballot also pictures several of the favored candidates with facsimiles of the city of Memphis official logo on their mugshots — a possible violation of city and state laws, Marek says.

Along with several pay-for-play ballots in circulation, there are also, as was noted in this space last week, various not-for-profit sample ballots in distribution locally, including a familiar one published online by Paula Casey, Jocelyn Wurzburg, and Dottie Jones (successor in that regard to her late mother, Happy Jones).

And 9th District U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of sample ballots put out in years past by congressional predecessor Harold Ford Sr., is a party to one — “The Most Qualified Democrats for Change” voters’ guide — expressing his preferences and those of County Commissioner Van Turner and former local party chair David Cocke, all bona fide Democrats. Cohen has in the past backed litigation against misappropriation of the name “Democratic” by purveyors of the pay-for-play ballots.

• As noted this week in the “Politics Beat Blog” at memphisflyer.com, sparks flew during a weekend forum featuring candidates for the two contested races for municipal judge.

Unexpectedly, incumbent Division Three Judge Jayne Chandler charged her opponent, Magistrate David Pool, with “dishonesty” in alleging that she was “unfair” in her conduct of her court, and that that was a reason for his several endorsements by various organizations. Pool denied making any such insinuations.

Chandler also denied rumors that she had a hand in making sure that her Division One counterpart, Judge Teresa Jones, had an opponent — lawyer LaTrena Davis-Ingram. Judge Jones, for her part, launched an attack on Davis-Ingram, who had, she said, resided, worked, and voted in Collierville right up to the point of declaring her candidacy for the Memphis judgeship. Davis-Ingram did not directly respond to the charge.

The forum fireworks seemed to constitute a confirmation of sorts that bad feelings persist between Jones and Chandler. The third municipal Judge, Tarik Sugarmon in Division 2, is unopposed.

City Judge Candidates: (from left) Judge Teresa Jones, Municipal Court, Division 1; Candidate LaTrena Davis-Ingram, Division 1; Magistrate David Pool, candidate in Division 3; Judge Jayne Chandler, Division 3

As political forums go, those involving clerks and judges are usually the tamest. In the case of the judicial races, in particular, there are canons of conduct that prohibit overt promises or explicitly political sentiments. So the forum scheduled for Saturday at St. Mary’s Cathedral on Poplar was expected to be a relatively ho-hum affair. It wasn’t; in fact, it turned into a guerrilla combat of sorts.

The first segment involved three of the several candidates for City Court Clerk — current deputy clerk Delicia DeGraffreeed, clerk employee Carl A. irons II, and De Givens. Nothing much out of the ordinary occurred besides the candidates’ discussion of their credentials and a few aspects of the office. About a third of the way through the planned event, the clerk part of the forum ended, and the four candidates for the two contested city judge positions took their seats behind the table. Unexpectedly, that’s where the mayhem ensued.

It started off with Jayne Chandler, reigning judge in Municipal Court, Division 3, who sat on the far right, next to her opponent, Criminal Court Magistrate David Pool. The two other candidates, vying for the judgeship of Municipal Court, Division 1, were incumbent Teresa Jones and challenger LaTrena Davis-Ingram.

Though the two paired antagonists were in each case seated next to each other, moderator Sharalyn Payton chose to pose all her questions in an order that leapfrogged that neat division, a quirk that often led her to overlook Pool in the sequence until prompted and, more importantly, interposed the responses of one or both of the Division 1 candidates when the Division 2 race began to include charges and counter-charges between Chandler and Pool.

As if to balance this state of affairs, Davis-Ingram and Jones, it turned out, had their own grudges to exchange, and, in the last half of the hour-long judicial part of the forum, the sparks flew in all directions.

The friction started when Payton posed a question about possible “bias” or other matters that might mar the principle of “fair and impartial” in court proceedings. Chandler was the first respondent, and she began with an obvious effort to settle a score. In a previous statement, Pool had recounted the various endorsements his candidacy had received (inter alia, from members of the Bar Association, from the AFL-CIO, and from the Shelby County Sheriffs’ Association, and from the Memphis Police Association) and suggested they underscored the need for a change in Division 3.

Chandler began: “I’m going to point to the person running against me, who has implied that I have not been faIr and impartial.” She maintained that Pool had first wanted to run in Division 1 and had requested her support for such a race. She then said,“To imply that the clerks asked him to run because I don’t treat people fairly, the police support him because I don’t treat people fairly,” why would he ask such a person for support in another division? “I don’t mind Mr. Pool running against me. It’s a democracy. It’s open. But be honest. An impediment to justice is dishonesty.”

Chandler then directed several questions to Irons, who was now sitting in the audience and was, she said, the resident clerk in her courtroom. She asked him a series of leading questions designed to draw Yes answers from him regarding such matters as her punctuality, her compassion, and her fairness in the courtroom. Dutifully, Irons answered each question in the affirmative.

“I’m a person of integrity. I have not been compromised. I will not be compromised,” Chandler declared. She said she would not be included on any sample ballot prepared under private auspices (an apparent reference to one such ballot circulated by Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, County Commissioner Van Turner, and former local Democratic chairman David Cocke), “I will not be demeaned or lied on.”

She then turned to another matter: “People have been saying I put LaTrena Davis in the race against Ms Jones. … Y’all report me good. I didn’t ask her to run against Ms Jones. She did it on her own. She has the right to run, just like he has the right to run,” indicating Pool. “But all these people who are supposed to be judges and honest and [to have] integrity walk around being dishonest. That’s why there’s no trust.”

She might have gone on longer, but League of Women Voters president Peg Watkins, who was acting as timekeeper, called time on her. There was a bit of a shocked pause in the room, as after an unexpected explosion.

Payton next called on, not Pool, but Davis-Ingram, who began to work her way through a more conventional kind of response, talking about factors in the lives of impoverished Memphians that might inhibit their trust in the judicial system.

She was followed by Judge Jones, who decided to pick up on one of Chandler’s themes. “There’s been a lot of talk about honesty, and that’s been one of the cornerstones of my entire life,” Jones said. “Is it honest when you say in an affidavit that you live in some place that you don’t live? You decide. You’re the voters.” This was a none-too-oblique reference to Davis-Ingram’s having maintained a residence in Collierville right up to her declaration for office in Memphis. Jones continued: “Is it honest to say that you’re on the side of the people in the community when, for 17 years you’ve voted in Collierville and lived in Collierville? You decide!…I stand before you with no public censures from the Board of Professional Responsibility, no violations for over 30 years…Can my opponent say the same? That’s honesty!”

Jones then re-surfaced the rumors, alluded to by Chandler, about the reasons for Davis-Ingram’s being in the race but dropped the matter without pronouncing on it one way or another. She sequed to a discussion of formal impediments to her office, including a lack of resources. “I am an honest person. I’ve lived in the inner city for the last 17 years. I’ve voted in city elections.”

With not one but two verbal wars underway now, Payton seemed about to ignore Pool, but audience reaction reminded her that he deserved a turn. And thus, several minutes after being directly attacked, he had a chance to defend himself. He denied ever saying that Chandler was unfair nor that he had ever sought her support. He then called it “unjust and unfair” to single out a clerk and put him on the spot, as Chandler had done with Irons. That, he said, was “an extreme conflict of interest.” He said he had always respected Judge Chandler and, win or lose, would continue to.

The fireworks apparently over, or at least suspended, Payton then solicited questions at large from the audience. Several came — about the nature of fines and fees, the consistency of them from division to division, and a judge’s limited discretion concerning how to implement them; about possible attempts to block organized court-watch activists from specific courtrooms; and about affording police officers proper regard in the courtroom.

The earlier flare-ups had not lasted long, but with a week and a half yet to go before voting is over, their consequences could be several.