Tag: Linda PHillips

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Administrator Phillips is Target at Zoom Seminar

The minds of most people concerned about essential threats to the country are still focused on the coronavirus outbreak and the harm it can bring, but there is a dedicated band of activists whose concerns are threats to the validity of our elections through the means we provide for voting.

Linda Phillips

This is a group that communicates and compares notes with some regularity — mainly these days through Zoom or some other form of virtual web seminars. No few of them are residents of the Memphis and Shelby County communities, and, joined by sympathizers across the nation, they are focusing on the coming round of elections here scheduled for August 6th and on whatever voting apparatus is chosen to count the ballots.

Almost universally, they are suspicious of those in charge, notably of Shelby County Election Administrator Linda Phillips, and of the voting-machine manufacturer, ES&S, that they fear she will steer the contract for Shelby County’s forthcoming voting devices to.

The group, including both local citizens and ballot activists from around the nation, convened again Tuesday night on a Zoom event billed as National Forum on Government Transparency & Election Security, with the subhead “Lifting the Veil of Secrecy on Shelby County Elections.”

Co-moderating the affair were Erika Sugarmon, locally, and Susan Pynchon of AUDIT Elections USA. Among the participants were, locally, Shelby County election commission member Bennie Smith, former EC members George Monger and Norma Lester, former Shelby County commissioner and University of Memphis law professor Steve Mulroy, and, tuning in nationally, Jennifer Cohn; San Francisco attorney, ballot-security writer, and election-integrity advocate Bev Harris of Black Box Voting; John Brakey, co-founder of AUDIT USA; and TV actress Mimi Kennedy.

Though all of the participants were proponents of hand-marked paper ballots as the safest and most effective election mode and a fair amount of commentary was turned in that direction, a good deal of the conversation concerned the background and presumed current attitudes of Administrator Phillips.

A point raised by several of the speakers was what they saw as potential conflicts of interest on Phillips’ part, citing her alleged affinity for products of the ES&S Co., manufacturers of the kind of ballot-marking devices she has expressed an open preference for, and noting, among other things, that the first major purchase she oversaw after being hired as Shelby County Election Administrator in 2016 was for voter-registration software manufactured by her then most recent employer, a company called Everyone Counts.

Everyone Counts, which Phillips left in the spring of 2016 to take the Shelby County job, was one of five companies bidding on a contract for voter-registration software, and Lester, a Democratic Election Commissioner at the time, remembers Phillips as having put a rush on for purchasing the software and making the selection without polling commission members for their preference. Nor did she disclose the fact of having an immediate past relationship with the company.

Harris characterized the Everyone Counts company as one without a reputation in the field at the time and which went out of business shortly thereafter, selling its assets to another buyer.

Philips was also taken to task by Mulroy and others for making unsubstantiated claims that fraud and voter error are both enhanced or even enabled by the use of hand-marked paper ballots

The Election Commission has a meeting scheduled for 5 p.m. Thursday of this week to hear Phillips’ recommendation for new voting devices for use in Shelby County elections, and participants in Tuesday’s Zoom seminar were encouraged to audit those proceedings and to participate in them to the degree permitted.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Election Commission Hears from Public, Will Delay Vote on New Voting Machines

The outlook for proposed new voting machines looks more muddled than ever after a virtual telemeeting of the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC) Wednesday that was marred by the frequently indistinct audio transmission.

But numerous testimonies from participating citizens were noted, most of them being read into the record from written statements supplied to the SCEC. The great majority of comments were in favor of equipment allowing hand-marked paper ballots, with arguments ranging from cost savings to transparency to an alleged greater safety factor relative to touch-screen alternatives during the coronavirus pandemic.

The roster of citizens calling in or contributing statements ranged far and wide and included sitting public officials and a bevy of well-known activists.

Originally, the five election commissioners were scheduled to vote Wednesday on a recommendation by Election Administrator Linda Phillips of a specific machine vendor, but a vote was postponed to allow the meeting to substitute for a previously promised public comment meeting that had been sidetracked by the onset of the epidemic.

It is taken for granted that Administrator Phillips favors machine-marked voting instruments outfitted so as to allow for a paper trail, but no details on her preference were presented Wednesday.

At the end of the meeting, Commissioner Brent Taylor, one of the three Republican representatives on the five-member commission, moved to postpone any voting until whatever turns out to be the Phillips/staff recommendation can be presented to County Mayor Lee Harris, who can then certify it and call for a vote by the County Commission, which has the responsibility of funding the new machines.

That strategy, which was adopted by the Election Commission, would not directly alter Phillips’ choice, regarded as likely to be endorsed by the SCEC, but it would enable the results of the SCEC-ordered RFP (request for proposal) to be made public, and it would give the County Commission, which had previously voted in favor of hand-marked paper ballots, some means of expressing its collective mind — and possibly its will — on the matter.

As it happened, the County Commission, which was meeting in committee simultaneously with the Election Commission, had on its agenda yet another resolution endorsing hand-cast paper ballots but agreed to send the issue down to its Monday public meeting without a recommendation after hearing of the Election Commission’s action.

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Politics Politics Feature

Ballot Bombshell: Election Machine Issue Becomes Moot

Some drama was expected, but nothing like the more-than-audible gasp that exuded from the audience at Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission, when Tami Sawyer articulated what was suddenly and shockingly becoming obvious:

“There will be no new machines in 2020,” said Sawyer, summarizing it all in an epiphany after an hour or so of intense debate and argument on both sides of the speakers’ dock regarding what sort of new voting machines the county should get in its long-planned buy in time for the August election cycle locally.

County Election Coordinator Linda Phillips had been making and repeating that promise of new machines for most of the last year, kindling up an ever-growing local controversy as to which type of machine. On Sunday she had published a viewpoint in The Commercial Appeal in which the following two sentences were the key ones: “Now that we are about to replace our outdated voting equipment, the controversy has reached the boiling point. I have spent my career conducting elections, and I’d like to share my viewpoint.”

Jackson Baker

House District 97 candidate Gabby Salinas (l), one of two Democrats running, enjoys an exotic Mideastern dance in her honor at a weekend fundraiser.

Phillips’ viewpoint, as spread out over two pages in the paper, was that ballot-marking devices (BMDs) are superior to voter-marked paper ballots (VMPBs) because, she argued, they are more secure from error, though she acknowledged they were somewhat more expensive as machinery. A contrary point of view is being argued by a determined group of local voter-reform activists, who stress that the hand-marked method is cheaper and more easily checked for accuracy and that the ballot-marking devices favored by Phillips are eminently hackable.

To underscore the latter point, one of the VMPB advocates, Bennie Smith, who doubles as a Democratic member of the Shelby County Commission and styles himself an expert on voting technology, had demonstrated to a previous meeting of the commission that he could insert a predetermined vote total into a result line of the BMD machine’s paper readout.

Both kinds of machine, Phillips has pointed out, possess a “paper trail” capability allowing voters to see and approve a printout of their ballot. (Critics of BMDs, the machines employing ballot-marked devices, complain that voters are asked to base their comparison ultimately on an unintelligible bar code.)

Anyway, the verbal battle was raging as usual on Monday, though Phillips herself was absent, when everything became moot.

Prompted by commission chairman Mark Billingsley, Marcy Ingram, deputy county attorney and de facto legal adviser to commission members, announced to the assembly at large that state law — to wit, TCA 29-111 — forbade any purchase of new voting technology without a prior voter referendum.

“Yes, Mr. Chairman earlier today, we determined that in the budget, the commission has a lot of leeway to use CIP funds, general obligation bonds, to pay for the voting machines. And there’s a statute on the books that’s about 15 years old that says that if you use general obligation bonds you do have to put it out to the voters to let them decide whether or not this is appropriate. So, with that being said, you would have to have a special election or have to put the item on the August ballot, if you intend to use CIP.”

Billingsley reinforced the point: “So in layman’s language for people in the audience and people listening at home … there would have to be a referendum.”

“That would be correct,” Ingram replied. And moments later, Commissioner Sawyer expressed the bottom line: “No new machines in 2020.”

Sawyer went on to argue — in the long run, successfully — that it would still be useful to vote on the resolution that had been in question before the bombshell.

That was Agenda Item #33: “Resolution of the Board of County Commissioners of Shelby County, Tennessee, urging the Shelby County Election Commission to pursue a voter-marked paper ballot approach when spending county funds for new voting equipment.” The primary sponsors of the resolution were Commissioners Van Turner, Willie Brooks, Sawyer, and Reginald Milton.

The background was the fact that the Shelby County Election Commission had, at Phillips’ request, issued an RFP (request for proposal) to potential bidders who would supply new voting machines for use by her promised date of August, and the controversy over which kind of machine had flared up there.

On the basis of the divided responsibilities built into Shelby County government — in this case, that, while the SCEC could decide on the machinery, the county commission could vote Yes or No on whether to fund the purchase — the advocates of hand-marked ballots, prevented from speaking at SCEC on grounds that the RFP was underway, had resolved to take their case to the commision.

Before attorney Ingram’s bombshell announcement, the VMPB activists — law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, teacher and recent city council candidate Erika Sugarmon, former legislator and school board member Mike Kernell, and veteran rights activist Dr. Suhkara A. Yahweh — had pleaded their case, with eloquence and examples.

It was all for naught, though there would indeed be a vote on the agenda item, expressing a preference for ultimate use of hand-marked ballots by a de facto party-line vote of 7-6, with yea votes coming from Democrats Brooks, Mickell Lowery, Eddie Jones, Milton, Sawyer, Michael Whaley, and Turner and no votes coming from Republicans Mick Wright, David Brandon, Amber Mills, Brandon Morrison, chairman Billingsley, and Democrat Edmund Ford.

Jackson Baker

Commissioner Wright cited the fundamental irony

In the fallout from the bombshell, there was general discontent from commissioners, whatever their ideology or point of view on the merits of particular machines, that word of the potential predicament had not been sounded long before, that, as Chairman Billingsley put it, “the people charged with the election would have made us aware of this by now.”

Commissioner Wright cited the ultimate irony of the situation: “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.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Gun Sales and Paper Ballots Are On the Agenda This Week

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.

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Politics Politics Feature

Modernizing the Vote; Bogus Ballots; and a Judgeship Kerfuffle

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.

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Last Call! Voters’ Final Chance to Set a New Course

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Glitches as Usual

To the victor belong the spoils, goes the saying, and in electoral terms in Tennessee, that means that, in contested partisan races, the name of the “governing party’s” candidate goes first on the ballot. Inasmuch as the governing state party these days is indisputably the Republicans, that means that the first name listed on the gubernatorial portion of the November 6th ballot is GOP nominee Bill Lee.

The second name on the ballot is supposed to be the candidate of the minority party. In the case of the gubernatorial race, that would be Democrat Karl Dean — followed by a list of independent candidates.

That being the case, there were probably very few people going to one of Shelby County’s 27 early voting locations who expected to find Dean’s name bumped to the second page of the ballot, at the other end of a lengthy sandwich made up of the names of 26 independent candidates. But that was exactly the case for those voters who chose to “enlarge type” on the voting machines.

While state law may have ordained that Lee, as the representative of the majority party, should be listed first, there was apparently no reason for jamming the names of independent candidates between his name and Dean’s other than the whim of state Election Coordinator Mark Goins, the Republican appointee who is the ultimate authority on how ballots should be arranged for Tennessee elections.

Election officials claimed that the unusual placement of Dean’s name via “enlarge type” magnification was due to built-in insufficiencies of the machinery in use — an explanation that is of little consequence to local activists who have campaigned for years for the elimination of the election machines used in local elections and their replacement by newer machines equipped with the capacity to make simultaneous paper records to facilitate accuracy in vote-checking.

Jackson Baker

Election officials facing off with the media.

Whether by caprice or conspiracy or simple coincidence, the election ending on the official election day of November 6th will have been marked by several other instances of presumably avoidable confusion. 

Examples abound: Three referenda of some importance to the future of Memphis (whose registered voters are the only ones entitled to vote on them) are worded like something translated loosely from oral sources in Uzbekistan. And in this case, suspicion is strong that the confusion is intentional.

One is a referendum on City Ordinance #5676, which would prohibit someone from election as mayor or council member “if any such person has served at any time more than three (3) consecutive four-year terms, except that service by persons elected or appointed to fill an unexpired four-year term shall not be counted as full four-year term.” All clear?

The language would seem to be imposing a three-terms limit requirement. And it does, except that it conveniently omits that a two-term-limits requirement has already been passed by voters.

To be clear to voters, the ordinance should have specified that what it does is extend the current limitation by another four-year term. Hmmm. Anyone care to guess why the incumbent council members voted unanimously in favor of such misleading language?

Moreover, another problem with the referendum as worded in the ballot was pointed out by the most lengthily-tenured of all Memphis chief executives, Willie Herenton, who served from 1991 until his retirement in 2009 and was elected five times. 

At a press conference last week, Herenton and his attorney Robert Spence pointed out that the referendum language, as approved by the council, applied to electoral service  “at any time after December 31, 2011” — an exemption that would allow Herenton to pursue an announced mayoral race in 2019, whereas the language on the ballot seemingly would not.

In response, Council Chair Berlin Boyd summoned up all his formidable dudgeon to pronounce allegations by Herenton of fraud and conspiracy to be “fictitious” and dismissed the ballot language as due to a “drafting error” by council attorney Allan Wade. While he and Wade spoke vaguely of there being a possible “remedy” in Herenton’s case, the ballot will continue to read as it reads.

Another referendum, to establish City Ordinance #5669, repeals an amendment approved by the voters in a 2008 referendum that allowed “instant runoff voting,” a process involving the redistribution of runner-up ballots so as to declare majority winners without runoff elections, and would “restore the election procedure existing prior to the 2008 Amendment for all City offices,” while “expressly retaining the 1991 federal ruling for persons elected to the Memphis City Council single districts.”

IRV, also known as “Ranked Choice Voting,” is slated to be employed for the first time, unless repealed, in the 2019 city election. Though county Election Administrator Linda Phillips has pronounced the method eminently viable, incumbent council members and council attorney Allan Wade have possibly gone beyond their official wherewithal to oppose it.

During the 2018 legislative session, Wade dispatched city lobbyists to Nashville to lobby for a bill that would ban IRV statewide. More recently, Boyd used his chairman’s recap email to publicly argue for passage of the anti-IRV referendum and the other two.

The 2008 referendum enabling IRV, also known as “Ranked Choice Voting,” is scheduled, unless repealed, to be employed for the 2019 city election. In 2008, the ordinance bore a required “fiscal note” estimating savings for the city of $250,000, to be gained from making costly runoff elections unnecessary.

Presumably, Ordinance #5669 should also carry a fiscal note, in this case specifying a cost to the city for restoring runoffs of at least $250,000, amended for inflation. But no sum is specified, the city finance director having claimed an inability to estimate one. 

Should Ordinance #5669 pass, its clause calling for the restoration of runoff elections would clash directly with the language of the third referendum on the ballot, for Ordinance #5677, which would eliminate runoff elections altogether. Passage of both referenda would occasion legal confusion.

Some measure of confusion also could result from the fact that the ballot language asks citizens to cast their votes “for” or “against” the three referenda, whereas the language originally approved by the council and incorporated in the Election Commission’s official sample ballot seeks “yes” or “no” votes. This change, like the order of listing of candidates’ names, was apparently mandated by state Election Coordinator Goins.

All of the above by itself is sufficient to rattle the equilibrium of voters. But there’s more. Even before voting got under way, the Election Commission had to call a press conference to announce that not all of the voters’ registration applications that were completed by the official deadline had been processed and that some voters, once validated by registration records, would have to have their information channeled into the voting machines when they arrived to vote. 

Some early voters reported that they were given paper ballots instead, but election officials stoutly denied that — except in the case of isolated voters arriving at the polls without verifiable credentials. These voters were given “provisional ballots” to be checked against records at the end of the vote-counting process. These ballots are paper, but identifiable by a specific color code.

On top of a mounting propaganda campaign against early voting and what many see as the vote-discouraging effects of a state photo-ID law that requires working-class voters and impoverished citizens to furnish these badges of middle-class identity at the polls, this pattern of miscues suggests that the democratic process has become something of an obstacle course.

(left to right) Phil Bredesen, Democrat; Marsha Blackburn, Republican; Karl Dean, Democrat; Bill Lee, Republican

On the Cusp of Decision

As noted above, the seeds of mystery, doubt, and confusion have been sown a-plenty in the runup to the November election, the last of several electoral showdowns this year. Not to mention enough boilerplate and talking points and attack ads to exhaust the patience and menace the stability of the voting public.

Yet there is still a sense that this concluding election of 2018 could mark a real difference, perhaps even a decisive shift, in the direction not only of local events but in the developing destinies of the state of Tennessee and of the nation at large. This is evident both in the tenor of the two major statewide races on the ballot — for governor and for U.S. senator — but also in the incidentals of local races and of the three key referenda confronting Memphis voters.

In comparison to the issues on the Memphis ballot, the contests for governor and U.S. senator would seem to be relatively simple matters. The race for governor, between Franklin businessman Bill Lee, the Republican, and former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, the Democrat, has actually hewed fairly closely to the democratic concepts the forefathers may have had in mind. In their public statements, including those made in the course of two debates televised statewide, Lee and Dean have behaved with commendable courtesy and apparent respect toward each other, outlining their views without rancor or mystification.

Jackson Baker

Bill Lee (above) and Karl Dean (below) behave with “commendable courtesy.”

Karl Dean

Lee emphasizes his faith and allows for faith-based approaches, while, in keeping with his professed conservatism, espousing a preference for marketplace solutions. Dean, who stresses his track record as a mayor, has a greater affinity for governmental activism. The chief disagreement between the two is over the efficacy of Medicaid expansion, which Dean strongly favors, arguing that the state has been forfeiting $1 billion and a half annually in federal funds under the Affordable Care Act, money that could keep Tennessee’s struggling rural hospitals afloat. Lee counters that participation in the ACA bounty would amount to pouring such funding into a “fundamentally flawed system.”

It is generally acknowledged that Lee, a political newcomer, won his nomination by keeping free of the animosities and name-calling that early GOP gubernatorial frontrunners Diane Black and Randy Boyd hurled at each other. In like manner, Dean and his primary opponent, Democratic House Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley, kept the peace with each other for the most part.

But the general election showdown for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the GOP’s Bob Corker has been a slugfest in which former Governor Phil Bredesen, the Democrat, and 7th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn, the Republican, have thrown nonstop haymakers at each other, and in this case there is no sweet-natured Marlboro Man for grossed-out voters to turn to as an alternative. One of them — either Bredesen or Blackburn — will win in what started out as a neck-and-neck race but has shifted ever so gradually, if the polls can be trusted, in Blackburn’s direction.

Jackson Baker

Marsh Blackburn

Jackson Baker

Congressman Marsha Blackburn (above); former Governor Phil Bredesen (below)

Bredesen started out well enough, running on the common-sense notion that he should represent the people of his entire constituency, working across the aisle in Congress as, demonstrably, he did as governor. It may well be that he is a Democrat because in Nashville, perhaps the last remaining outpost of the onetime solid Democratic South, conditions still favor white Democrats running for office.

A case in point that illustrates the real Bredesen: In 2001, the year before Bredesen’s election as governor, then state Senator Marsha Blackburn advocated a Draconian eight percent spending cut across the entire state budget; Bredesen came to power, instituted a nine percent cut and began to radically downsize TennCare, the state health-care program that his well-intentioned Republican predecessor Don Sundquist had tried valiantly to maintain. Even the arch-conservative Blackburn praised him at the time.

So much for the GOP’s current campaign fiction that Bredesen, a former Nashville mayor who came into politics after making a fortune as a health-care entrepreneur, would be the tool of radical tax-and-spend Democratic taskmasters in Congress. His rhetorical throwing of Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer under the bus or his pubic praise of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh may have looked like craven cave-ins to Blackburn at the time, but those actions probably were true representations of Bredesen’s mind. 

Such criticism as Bredesen makes of the Trump administration, and it is minimal, is directed mainly at presidential gambles that might ultimately jeopardize the business climate, like Trump’s tariff wars.

Even so, the Bredesen-Blackburn race is one of crucial importance to the political balance of power, nationally. If Bredesen’s political stance is only modestly Democratic, Blackburn’s Republicanism is Trumpian brinkmanship to the max. Largely indifferent to social safety-net measures, she is a zealous advocate of the corporate tax-cut measures favored by congressional Republicans, wants to see Trump’s Great Wall built on the nation’s southern border, and is so much a champion of the profit motive that she, perhaps unwittingly, became the sponsor of a laissez-faire initiative that 60 Minutes highlighted as having opened the door to unregulated proliferation of opioid medications.

As a synecdoche, the Bredesen-Blackburn Senate race could well be the decisive one in determining whether the Democratic blue wave that flowed so vigorously for most of the year remains strong enough to accomplish the party’s return to power in Congress and its regeneration as a national force. It is no exaggeration to say that the eyes of the nation are upon us. (Local political races are dealt with in “Politics.”)

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City Voters in 2019 Will Rank Candidates 1-2-3 — and Avoid Runoffs

CREDIT: JB

JB

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
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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.