Joe Weinberg – Memphis Flyer

Given the number of shootings in Memphis and Shelby County, issues of firearms are never very far from public consciousness. One matter of more than usual relevance to the subject was scheduled for consideration by the Shelby County Commission this week.

This is the matter of gun shows in the county. At intervals during the year, large exhibitions of weapons for sale are staged at Agricenter International in East Memphis — and are ballyhooed in advance on billboards.

As gun fanciers and area motorists must surely know by now, the next such gun show, a two-day affair, will be held at the Agricenter on December 14th and 15th. Current gun laws allow the sale of weapons on such occasions without the invoking of backgound checks or other regulations in effect at other venues selling weapons.

The existence of gun shows, therefore, is regarded by many as constituting a loophole in laws to control the sales of firearms.

Shelbycountytn.gov

Tami Sawyer

If Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer has her way, the Agricenter (aka the ShowPlace Arena) will soon cease to be a site that can be used for gun shows.

She is offering a resolution for discussion at Wednesday’s meeting of the body’s law enforcement committee requesting “that the administration decline the use of property owned and operated by Shelby County Government for purposes of hosting gun shows, effective January 1, 2020, with the exception of any contract already in place at the adoption of this resolution.”

Sawyer’s resolution notes that “from January 1, 2016 through November 1, 2019, a total of 4,449 weapons offenses (misdemeanor and felony) were reported in Memphis,” and the U.S. attorney for the Western District said that “in the first three quarters of 2018, Memphis and unincorporated parts of Shelby County reported 3,659 gun crimes.”

The attorney noted further that “the U.S. Attorney’s Office has established a multi-agency task force sting, Operation Bluff City Blues, to reduce gun crime and restore public safety in Memphis and Shelby County.”

By prior action of the commission, Shelby County owns an “operation and management” contract over use of the Agricenter and will do so until June 30, 2024, and therefore has the right and opportunity to control the building’s use.

Since “gun shows are the antithesis of promoting public safety and community peace and harmony,” and “promoters of gun shows have available to them adequate private facilities with which they could contract to conduct these activities, and, upon the example of the City of Knoxville, which has enacted similar legislation opposing the use of public arena space for gun shows,” Sawyer’s resolution seeks that “gun shows be banned on property owned and operated by Shelby County Government, effective January 1, 2020, with the exception of any contract already in place at the adoption of this resolution.”

Preliminary debate on the resolution is scheduled for this Wednesday, with further discussion and a vote on the measure expected on Monday, December 9th.

• The latest in a series of legal efforts to force a revamping of Shelby County’s voting procedures was brought before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati this week, with an expedited hearing on whether a group of local plaintiffs have standing to file suit in the matter.

At stake in the suit is the issue of whether electronic voting per se can be relied on or whether Shelby County should return to conducting its elections by hand-marked paper ballots.

On behalf of themselves and other Shelby County voters, Carol Chumney, Mike Kernell, and Joe Weinberg were scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday, with Chumney presenting oral arguments.

This week’s hearing is a follow-up to previous legal efforts, including one that was rebuffed in October 2018 by U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker, who turned down a request for a temporary restraining order against the use of the county’s current voting machines for that year’s November elections.

Judge Parker declared that “the mechanism of elections is inherently a state and local function and federal courts should be cautious” and ruled that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to sue regarding the matter.

The plaintiffs appealed and were ultimately granted this week’s hearing. Their suit alleges the touchscreen voting machines used by Shelby County are outdated, insecure, and unable to produce a voter-verifiable paper trail, and that a variety of other security mechanisms are necessary to prevent possible distortion of election results.

Weinberg, a long-familiar presence in local efforts to amend the county’s voting procedures, said the plaintiffs are seeking something beyond the possible introduction of “paper-trail” technology to append to the present Diebold voting machines or to any other computerized machines that might be acquired.

In a speech to the Kiwanis Club of Memphis in September, county Election Administrator Linda Phillips declared that Shelby County should be able to hold elections with paper-trail capabilities by August 2020. Phillips said the county is in the process of acquiring equipment that would make possible a process combining electronic scanning with paper trail records.

Plaintiff Weinberg said this week, however, that only a reversion to the use of hand-marked paper ballots would reliably limit potential abuse. “Basically, anything digital can be hacked, including ballot-marking devices or the scanner you might use with paper ballots.”

Phillips had said in September that there would be disadvantages to a return to voting by paper ballot alone.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. She added, “How many elections can you recall in which the margin of victory was 5 percent or less?”

The failure of attempts to persuade local and state election officials to make voluntary changes made necessary the suit against the County and State Election Commissions, Weinberg said.

Election Administrator Linda Phillips at last week’s briefing on Ranked Choice Voting

“Ranked Choice Voting,” aka “Instant Runoff Voting,” is coming to Memphis in time for the city election of 2019. So says Shelby County Elections Administrator Linda Phillips, who conducted a public briefing on the process last Wednesday at the Election Commission’s Nixon Drive headquarters in Shelby Farms.

A sizeable turnout gathered to hear Phillips explain the process by which voters can rank their choices 1-2-3 in a given race on the ballot, after which a process of redistributing vote totals will allow for a majority winner to be selected in a multi-candidate race in which the initial leader holds only a plurality.

In theory, the process works simply and with mathematical precision — though it could take days in some cases to sift through the numbers and announce a winner.

In practice, the process can sound quite complicated, as, at times, it did last week during Phillips’ methodical elaboration of mathematical possibilities in a hypothetical race involving “candidates” named after the planets in our solar system. (“Pluto” would have won by plurality, but succumbed to “Venus” when all the ranked choices were considered.)

But the complexity of the process is deceptive, in the same sense in which a computer’s “search” mechanism, simple in its basic functioning, can be made to sound abstruse and even threatening.
Here’s an explanation of one variant of the process from University of Memphis law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, an early advocate, from a Flyer Viewpoint by him in 2008:

“In IRV, voters rank candidates in preference order: “1,” “2,” “3,” etc. Voters can rank as many or as few candidates as they wish. If a candidate gets a majority of first–place votes, that candidate wins. If not, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated. Votes for that candidate are redistributed among the remaining candidates based on those voters’ second-place choice. If someone thereby gains a majority, they are elected. If not, the next-weakest candidate is eliminated and the vote redistributed, until someone gets a majority.”

Or, as Mulroy put it at Wednesday’s meeting, “All the voter has to understand when he walks into the voting booth, is first choice, second choice, third choice.” Just as all a Google searcher has to do is put a name or a phrase in a blank and then click with his mouse.

T JB

There was a packed house at the Election Commission’s Nixon Drive headquarters.

o avoid confusion, the Election Commission plans to employ “lots of voter education” on how R.C.V. works.
The Election Commission, as Phillips explained, will try out the Ranked Choice Voting method this fall via an “in-house” mock election, involving Commission staff members only — although the media will be invited to observe that first experiment. A second mock election, involving the public, will be held at some unspecified point after the first one.

In any case, the Ranked Choice Voting formula will, as indicated, be applied for real in the city election of 2019. As with the two mock elections, the first round of voting will be automatically compiled on the currently available machines, but subsequent rounds of redistributing and counting votes will be done manually, accounting for the aforementioned delay in announcing results.

That delay would necessitate some additional costs, Phillips conceded, but not to the extent of the mandatory — and skimpily attended — runoff elections held in city districts where no candidate gets a majority in the first round.

Administrator Phillips also conjectures that the city’s two at-large Super Districts might be eligible for R.C.V. in 2019, although they have not been subject to runoffs since a 1991 ruling by the late U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner was regarded as precluding such a prospect. Presumably, the Ranked Choice Voting process is different enough in its implications (it leaves no opportunity for a runoff-round “bias shift,” for example) to warrant a reconsideration.)

That it will have taken more than a decade since voters, in essence, approved an R.C.V.-like process via a charter amendment in 2008, is due to a combination of circumstances: confusion at the Election Commission as to whether it would need to purchase specific kinds of sophisticated equipment; and similar confusion and/or reluctance at the level of state government, which has the duty of certifying local voting systems.

Whatever the facts were then, Phillips pr
JB

Voting-machine watchdog Dr. Joe Weinberg expressed a desire for ‘paper trail’ voting.

ofesses certainty that the touch-screen voting machines currently in use in Shelby County can accommodate the Ranking Choice Voting method.

The desirability, as soon as possible, of machines with “paper-trail” capability was voiced by some attendees at Wednesday’s briefing session — notably RCV supporter Dr. Joe Weinberg, a veteran watchdog on what he sees as a susceptibility to hacking on the part of the voting technology currently in use.

Phillips has asserted, and did so again on Wednesday, that the Commission intends to purchase new machines in 2020 or 2021 for use in the 2022 election cycle, although whether these machines will be equipped to provide reliable “paper-trail” results — a feature sought by Mulroy, Weinberg, and other advocates of voting-machine reform — will remain unknown until the funding and acquisition process is completed.

A spokesperson for Phillips said this week that the Commission has $2 million in leftover HAVA (Help America Vote Act) funds and will attempt to secure another $11.7 million from county, state, or federal sources to complete the purchase.