JoeDae L. Jenkins – Memphis Flyer

Those readers of even moderate faculties of memory will recall a pair of legal set-tos last year pitting the Shelby County Election Commission against plaintiffs who were charging either disproportionate voting processes favoring suburbanites or outright voter suppression. Both issues were decided in favor of the plaintiffs, against suppression, and for the maximum possible enabling of the voting franchise.

Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett

The sad fact is — regarding this, as on a whole panoply of other matters — state government is attempting to intervene against the results of decision-making at the local level (in this case, against decisions in Shelby County Chancery Court). A bill backed by Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and state Election Coordinator Mark Goins would not only penalize new-voter applications that are incomplete but would hold individuals and organizations responsible for helping turn them in via voter registration drives, saddling those individuals and organizations with fines of up to $8,000.

This issue of incomplete ballots, of course, was the one adjudicated last year in the courtroom of Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins, who directed the Election Commission, which had thrown out various incomplete applications, to extend its deadlines long enough to allow those applications to be completed and/or amended.

Democratic members of the General Assembly held a press conference at the Capitol on Tuesday to protest the measure (House Bill 1079/Senate Bill 971), which is pending this week in both the House and the Senate. They were backed up by representatives of the Tennessee Equity Alliance and the Black Voter Project. State Representative John Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville) went through a brief history of prior voter suppressions, including the photo ID law and the prohibition of college IDs in connection with it. He said, “Ask Tre Hargett and ask Mark Goins what they’re afraid of? Black students? Brown students?”

Another Nashville Democrat, Vincent Dixie, followed that up: “If they’re not afraid of competition, why are they afraid to let people vote? What is this legislation really addressing?”

Those two were followed by state Senator Brenda Gilmore (D-Nashville), who provided the interesting (and alarming) fact that, in the interval since Tennessee’s adoption of the Voter ID law, the state had fallen from number 27 in its ratio of voter turnout to dead last. And finally Representative Bob Freeman (D-Nashville) issued the compelling truism: “We don’t need to do anything to rebut people’s right to vote.”

It remains to be seen, of course, if the Republican supermajority that controls the General Assembly can be brought to re-examine its premises. And even if the bill should pass muster in both chambers this week, there would remain the hope that Governor Bill Lee, who is capable of common sense and compassion despite his ever more obvious conservatism, could issue a veto.

And, if worse should come to worst legislatively, there are always the courts — and the hope that the judgment of Chancellor Jenkins can be replicated on a statewide scale.

Everybody knows by now that the last couple of weeks on the national and international scenes have been unusually crucial ones. In particular, the destructive wanderings of President Donald Trump over the landscapes of our traditional European allies, culminating in his obsequious bow of obedience to Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, may already have upset the traditional balance of power that has existed in the world since 1945.

And, make no mistake about it, that’s a bad thing.

Events that happened in that same time frame within the governmental chambers and courtrooms of Shelby County may have tipped local politics into a new order, as well. And that could be a good thing.

The major circumstance of local politics in that period concerned no particular election race, although there are several ongoing contests of importance, and the outcomes of an unusually large number of them are hard to predict. The seminal event locally was, in one sense, legal, though in another sense it cut to the root of the political process itself.

The issue was that of early voting, in particular, and the very democratic gift of self-government, in general. The early-voting period for county Democratic and Republican primaries, conducted in May at 21 sites countywide, had gone off relatively seamlessly and had even generated a modest uptick in the rate of early voting, something for which neither Shelby County nor Tennessee at large had been noted for up to then. So, when the Shelby County Election Commission, on June 21st, announced that, for early voting prior to the August 2nd county general election and state/federal primaries, it was adding three new sites in the Republican hinterland and designating the Agricenter, located in the heart of suburbia, as a master site of sorts, open for four extra days, local Democrats took umbrage, not merely protesting their belief that the change reflected bias but taking the issue to court.

We’re not necessarily endorsing the validity of their charge nor finding culpability in the actions of the Shelby County Election Commission, but we did take satisfaction in the ultimate verdict from Chancellor JoeDae L. Jenkins that the commission needed to further diversify its add-on sites, providing a truer balance between Democratic voting constituencies and Republican ones.

And we take additional pleasure in noting that the turnout on the first two days of early-voting at the amended roster of early-voting sites was much brisker than usual. Democrats in particular made a point of turning out in large numbers, but it seemed clear that a Republican response in like measure was due to follow.

The bottom line is that the current election has a fair chance of generating authentic results from the community at large. It takes a village, as the saying goes, and it also takes aroused opinion in that village and, if need be, legal action on the part of its tribunals.

And who knows? Maybe an equivalent reaction from an American citizenry fed up and embarrassed by the summit surrender at Helsinki can force some overdue reordering on the national political landscape, as well.