Tag: Robert Meyers

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Politics Politics Feature

Mayoral Residency: What’s at Stake

Shelby County Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins (Photo: Memphis Bar Association | Facebook)

Between the 18th of this month, a Thursday, and the 22nd, a Monday, there will fall one business day and a weekend. Within that brief period, the political history of Memphis for at least four years — and maybe longer — could well be determined.

The 22nd is the first date on which candidate petitions for the October 5th city election will be made available by the Shelby County Election Commission. The 18th, four days prior, shapes up as a day of judgment for candidate eligibility. On that date, the long-festering issue of residency requirements for mayor will be resolved, one way or the other, in the courtroom of Shelby County Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins.

So indicated His Honor on Monday. His fateful announcement, made at the close of a hearing on the residency matter, followed an equally eventful one from Memphis city attorney Jennifer Sink, rendered in Jenkins’ courtroom by Michael Fletcher, a lawyer for the city. In essence, Sink said via Fletcher that an opinion she had requested weeks ago from attorney Robert Meyers reflected city policy, reversing a statement she made last month in which she declined to go that far.

The Meyers opinion had cited language in an 1895 city charter mandating a prior residency in Memphis for a period of five years for candidates for mayor. That opinion, published on the Shelby County Commission website, generated significant turmoil, including litigation from two announced candidates — Sheriff Floyd Bonner and NAACP president Van Turner — challenging such a mandate.

Bonner and Turner, whose suits were later combined, insist that Memphis voters approved a superseding referendum in 1996 that did away with a prior-residency requirement for both mayoral candidates and candidates for the city council, and that several city elections had been held since under the new standard. (Indeed, several current members of the council could not have passed a five-year requirement for prior residency.)

As for Sink’s apparent change of mind, lawyers for the litigants point out that the city doesn’t administer elections; the Election Commission does, which had meanwhile dropped Meyers’ opinion from its website.

In danger of invalidation, Bonner and Turner, who until recently lived just outside the city, are joined by former Mayor Willie Herenton, a sometime resident of Collierville in recent years. Ironically, all three were basically tied for the lead in the only mayoral poll made public so far.

One clear beneficiary of their ouster (though he has steered clear of the controversy) would be Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Paul Young, who by a wide margin would lead the rest of the declared field in fundraising. Two other mayoral hopefuls, businessman J.W. Gibson and School Board member Michelle McKissack, have declared themselves in favor of the Meyers opinion.

In the wake of Monday’s events, Bonner issued a ringing statement which said in part: “The voters of Memphis voted in 1996 to do away with a dated residency requirement from the 1800s, and we are fighting to make sure the people’s voice is heard.” Turner also responded: “It is unfortunate that some group of insiders are trying to decide the election instead of letting the will of the voters play out. … [W]e will continue to prepare for our day in Court on May 18, and we will continue to campaign on the issues and not the distractions.”

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Time to Replace Shelby County Voting Machines

Robert Meyers, chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC), informed Memphis Rotarians, according to the August 7th edition of the Flyer, that I do not know what I am talking about when expressing concern about our continued use of Diebold Accuvote TSX electronic voting machines. I hope the Rotarians did not take any solace from these vacuous remarks from the leader of the much maligned and censored SCEC.

Let me share some of what disturbs me about our use of these machines: 

1) The software that runs the elections for our Diebold Accuvote TSX machines was never tested in the certification process relied upon by Tennessee and Shelby County in purchasing the machines. Thus this certification was corrupted and should be considered invalid. 

2) Shelby County is the only county in the state to use the TSX with GEMS software without a voter-verifiable paper trail.

3) Other states have reported problems with elections run with the Accuvote TSX system. Some have decertified the machinery. Others requested changes to the software.

4) No changes have been made to our machines since they were purchased in 2006. Indeed, the SCEC has repeatedly ignored and trivialized reports of problems from other jurisdictions using the TSX as not pertinent to Shelby County.

5) The TSX machine and the GEMS software package run on a Microsoft Windows CE operating platform. The interfaces between the Microsoft and Diebold components were specifically not tested in the original certification. The interface between Diebold software and Windows 2000 has been problematic elsewhere. Microsoft has provided many patches and updates for the CE operating system over the years. None of these has been applied to our machines. Indeed, the SCEC has not even investigated these updates to determine if any would be relevant to our system’s functioning.

6) Meyers and company defend the TSX machine by stating that we have never had a problem in Shelby County. Unfortunately, the SCEC steadfastly does not look for trouble. Computer experts have demonstrated many times that these machines and the GEMS server that compiles the ballots are easy to hack. We know from previous lawsuits that at least one back door exists that would allow results to be manipulated. Our current audit procedures are inadequate. The auditors totally missed the recent problems in the County Commission District 10 Democratic primary.

7) Meyers and the rest of the SCEC were unaware that the TSX stores virtual images of all ballots cast until I informed them of this in 2013. The SCEC makes no use of this data.

8) The Diebold name became such a liability that the company changed the name of its voting machine division to Premier. In September 2009, Diebold divested itself of the voting machine division, selling it to Election Systems & Software (ES&S). Eight months later, ES&S sold Premier to Dominion, which holds the rights to the TSX machine today. Despite this, the SCEC continues to use ES&S as its support vendor for the TSX machines.

9) Meyers glibly points out that the public is protected by the presence of three Republican and two Democratic commissioners. He knows better. Most decisions by the commission are decided by 3-to-2 party line votes.

Democratic commissioners have complained about altered minutes and being asked to vote on material without time for review. Just ask former Commissioner George Monger if he had access to all the information and cooperation from commission staff that he required.

Given that we don’t have any independent verification that these machines work as claimed and that the SCEC makes only ineffectual attempts to verify the correctness of the vote count, how can the commissioners have faith in any of the numbers they certify? That remains a mystery to me.

Let us get rid of these aging, highly vulnerable, insecure, and non-updated machines and move to paper ballots with a voter verified paper trail and optical scanning. 

Joe Weinberg is a physician and Democratic activist with an abiding interest in election issues and voting-machine technology.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Watching the Vote in Shelby County

In case it hadn’t been obvious beforehand, a sequence of events early this week made it clear that an aura of serious partisan distrust pervaded the political environment of Shelby County just prior to Thursday’s county general election and state and federal primaries. On Monday, there was the Shelby County Commission’s Democrats-only vote (7-to-0, with Republicans abstaining) calling for federal monitors of this week’s election, followed a day later by a scathing denial of major problems in the election process by Robert Meyers, the Republican chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission.

Speaking to members of the Memphis Rotary Club on Tuesday, Meyers addressed several questions brought up by Democrats during several crises that have bedeviled the Election Commission over the past few years. “Anybody who says there are problems with machines doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” said Meyers, who insisted that neither the voting machines themselves nor the computers used for voter registration had manifested any significant flaws. He acknowledged there had been some “connectivity” problems once, due to a transmission wire; that was all.

We are certain that Dr. Joe Weinberg, an all-but-full-time critic of the Diebold machines in use throughout the county, would demur, as he has repeatedly over the years.

The chairman did say that he had no objection to converting to Opti-Scan machines, which can generate a fail-safe paper trail and for which state funding is apparently available. “We haven’t rejected that,” he said, but suggested other issues had priority, like that of perfecting the voter-registeration process.

Meyers acknowledged there had been internal problems in establishing accurate precinct lines for the August 2012 election and that, along with other complications, these had resulted in a judicial decision, currently under appeal, invalidating a Shelby County Schools board election that year. But he contended that the problem of bad precinct lines had been discovered and then corrected internally, by the commission in tandem with the office of administrator Richard Holden. As we recall, however, the problem was first made public by outcries from citizens like David Holt, who were given wrong ballots. The problem was later diagnosed in formidable detail by Weinberg and blogger Steve Ross.

Meyers was reminded by a Rotarian questioner of adverse reports on Election Commission activities — from an internal Shelby County government audit and from a study initiated by the state that uncovered a lack of timeliness on the commission’s part in dealing with redistricting data in 2012. Again, the chairman said these issues had been corrected.

The key to long-term security in elections lies in the way the commission is constructed, with members from both the Republican and Democratic parties, Meyers contended. (The current state-prescribed ratio, in Shelby County, as in the state’s other 94 counties, is three Republicans and two Democrats, in recognition that the GOP is now the state’s majority party in the General Assembly.)

“They  are there to watch each other,” said Meyers, and he offered a mock “hurrah” at the idea of federal monitors joining in the watch, along with poll-watchers from both parties, this Thursday. “We have nothing to hide,” he said firmly.

That’s one Republican vote for strengthening the monitoring process, however grudgingly. No doubt genuine bipartisanship is just around the corner. Or not.