Tag: Shelby County Election Commission

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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 Beat Blog

More Voting Machines Controversy

Among the potential local casualties of the coronavirus, there is an unexpected one — the democratic process itself. At this week’s scheduled virtual meeting of the Shelby County Election Commission, the five Commissioners —three Republicans and two Democrats, in conformity with state regulations regarding majority party/minority party ratios — are primed to vote on Election Administrator Linda Phillips’ recommendations for new voting machines.

Phillips has declared that the members of the Election Commission must take a definitive up-or-down vote on the vendor, whom she will recommend from among those manufacturers who responded to an RFP (request for proposal) issued earlier by the SCEC. She has declared that the decision must come now so that the machines can be in use for August voting in the county.

For years, and for the last several months in particular, controversy has raged between activists who insist on voting machines that permit voter-marked ballots and advocates of machine-marked ballots. Phillips herself has expressed a preference for the latter type, equipped with paper-trail capability. By a narrow, party-line vote, the majority-Democratic Shelby County Commission, which must approve funding for the purchase, has expressed its own preference for hand-marked ballots.

Given the fact that Phillips’ choice of machine type is more or less predictable, and that the cost factor will be built into the selection of vendor, that will put the County Commissioners in an awkward position of having to rubber-stamp whatever choice the SCEC passes on to them.

“The process is backwards,” says GOP Election Commissioner Brent Taylor, who say,. “The Election Commission should not have initiated the RFP and passed the decision about funding on to the County Commission. What we [the Election Commission members] should have done is come to some broad general decision ab out the kind of machines we wanted and then let the County commission issue an RFP, make the choice, and then vote on the funding.”

In that regard he agrees with law professor and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, an exponent of voter-marked paper ballots who points out further that what got skipped in the process was a promised public meeting of the Election Commission at which the public could offer input on the desirability of various types of voting machines.

Such a meeting was to have taken place in the last month or so, or in any case before a vote on the vendor was taken by the Election Commission. Or so it was announced at a February meeting of the SCEC. What intervened — and ended up scotching the meeting — was the coronavirus epidemic.

So there will be not opportunity for direct public input concerning the specifics of Phillips’ recommended purchase, a fact further complicated by the awkwardness of the virtual telemeeting process, which, in conformity with cautionary official rules against public assemblies, precludes an actual gathering with the attendant opportunity of easy back and forth interaction between Election Commissioners and the public.

GOP Election Commissioner Brent Taylor

And it seemingly assures that something of a contentious showdown will ensue at the subsequent County Commission meeting, itself convened as a telemeeting, at which funding for the ultimately selected voting machines will be on the agenda. Back when the Commission voted a preference for hand-marked paper ballots, County Commissioner Van Turner made a point of telling Phillips, who was in attendance, that the Commission had ways of exercising its disapproval of a choice.

That memorable and perhaps prophetic exchange went this way: “We can deny the funding,” said Turner. “We can sue you,” Phillips said in response.

The progress toward a new voting system has encountered other obstacles. One was a bombshell ruling by the County Commission legal staff in mid-February that state law — to wit, TCA 29-111 — forbade any purchase of new voting technology without a prior voter referendum. As County Commissioner Mick Wright noted at the time: “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.”

The aforesaid Mulroy, however, spurred further research that eventually led the County Commission to create a capital source from existing contingency funds that could bypass the need for a referendum (and incidentally buttress the County Commission’s proprietary sense of the matter).

Another late snag, with partisan overtones, developed from a letter sent to the three GOP Election Commissioners from state Senator Byron Kesey and other Republican legislators calling for the new voting machines to involve machine-marked ballots.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Make It Manual! Voting by Hand is Safer and More Accurate.

Steve Mulroy

Shelby County is getting ready to replace its aging, unsecure voting machines with new voting equipment. When we did this 15 years ago, we opted for the more expensive, shiny, new high-tech touchscreen system over the more reliable low-tech paper ballot system, causing years of election problems.  

Steve Mulroy

We’re about to make the same mistake again.  

Hand-Marked Paper Ballots vs. Touchscreens: Local election reform advocates argue for a hand-marked paper ballot system. A voter would fill out a paper ballot by hand, filling in the bubbles on a scantron sheet like we’ve been doing for half a century with the high school ACT test. The voter would then feed the paper into a scanner, which would record the vote and retain the paper ballots securely so they could be used as a check against the computer record.  

This system is used in 38 states. Hamilton County (Chattanooga) has used it successfully for over 20 years. 

Instead, the Shelby County Election Commission is considering the latest shiny, new system, the Ballot Marking Device (BMD). With BMDs, voters would press touchscreens as before, and the touchscreen computer would print out a paper receipt which the voter can then inspect for accuracy before feeding it into a machine. The BMD system is twice as expensive and half as secure. 

Expense: Both BMD and hand-marked paper ballots require a scanner at each voting precinct. But BMDs additionally require at least three to four expensive BMD touchscreen machines at each precinct. Gilford County, North Carolina, recently reported saving $5 million by opting for hand-marked paper ballots over BMDs. Since their population is smaller, it’s reasonable to expect about an $8 million savings here in Shelby. 

Security: The security problem is in letting a computer mark the paper receipt rather than having each voter do it himself. Any computer can be hacked. Human beings can’t. Election security experts have already demonstrated how BMD machines can be hacked to make the computer print out bogus candidate selections. And even absent fraud, like with all computers, glitches are possible. 

BMD advocates say, not to fear: Before the voter feeds the paper receipt into the scanner, she can spot any error and alert an election official. But that may not work in the real world, with a sophisticated hack or a non-obvious glitch. A recent University of Michigan study showed that over 90 percent of the time, voters failed to report such errors when they were present. In a close race, the study concluded, these computer errors could easily change an election outcome. 

Even worse, most BMD scanners actually read a bar code on the paper receipt, like the kind used at a grocery checkout line, instead of the human-readable parts of the paper showing which candidates were selected. Since human beings can’t read a bar code, even the most diligent and eagle-eyed voter won’t be able to tell if her vote’s being stolen. Colorado recently banned bar codes in its elections. 

For these reasons, most election security experts recommend hand-marked paper ballots over BMDs. Since the scanners common to both systems are also not perfect, they also recommend Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs), where election officials manually examine a statistical sample of paper ballots to make sure they match up with the computer-recorded vote totals. Four states now require RLAs, with more expected. 

The Other Side: BMD advocates object, saying that voters will screw up marking their paper ballots, introducing unacceptable levels of voter error. It’s also harder for some disabled voters, they argue. Finally, they say it’s unworkable during early voting in a big county like Shelby, which has over 100 different types of ballot faces (depending on which state/county/city/school board district a particular voting precinct is in). But Hamilton County, the third-largest county in the state, with over 135 different ballot faces, has managed all these issues successfully for over 20 years. They report low voter-error rates, smooth early voting sailing, and accommodations for disabled voters in each precinct. If they can make it work, why can’t we? 

The Shelby County Commission, which has to authorize most of the $10 to $12 million in tax dollars for this voting machine purchase, is this week and next considering a resolution supporting hand-marked paper ballots and not BMDs.  The resolution would put the Election Commission on notice that they should move toward hand-marked ballots if they want county funding. There’s still time to get this right. Contact the County Commission this week at 222-1000 and tell them you want hand-marked paper ballots with Risk Limiting Audits. 

Or, be prepared for another 15 years of unreliable elections. 

Steven Mulroy, a former Shelby County Commissioner who teaches election law at the University of Memphis law school, is author of the book Rethinking US Election Law: Unskewing the System.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bredesen Says Senate Race is “Knife Edge” Affair, Takes Election Commission to Task

CREDIT: JB

JB

Speaking to supporters at Railgarden, former Governor Phil Bredesen appeals for a good turnout at the polls. 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen (l) was one of several Democratic officials attending the Thursday lunch, which was hosted by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris.

With only days to go before final votes are cast on November 6, former Governor Phil Bredesen made it clear that he is counting on a good turnout in Shelby County to bolster his bid for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by incumbent Republican Bob Corker.

Bredesen, the Democratic nominee, is opposed by Republican nominee Marsha Blackburn, currently the U.S. Representative of Tennessee’s 7th congressional district. Speaking at a luncheon at Railgarden, he said he thought there were enough Democrats, independents, and independent-minded Republicans in Shelby County to help him across the finish line, but “it really is about turnout.”

But it wasn’t just the numbers and availability of voters that he considered important. Asked about various charges and counter-charges involving the Shelby County Election Commission, Bredesen seconded in general the concerns expressed by local Democrats.

“I do think that the Shelby County Election Commission, from what I’ve seen, needs to gets its act together here, and I hope they can put some time and energy to it by next Tuesday,” said Bredesen, who continued without referring to specific controversies. “There have been some issues coming up that don’t exist in other places. I think they should make sure that everybody who is supposed to vote gets to vote and the results are put out in a timely fashion without politics going on. They’re certainly capable of doing that.”

The former Governor said that, as he had anticipated, “the election is very close, on the knife edge, and I think — I certainly hope — I’m on the right side of the edge.”

Bredesen went light on specific issues, though he mentioned health care as a problem transcending ideological positions. “Social Security and Medicare are not Democratic laws. They are American laws,” he said.

As he has stated in his previous public statements and in ads on his behalf, Bredesen made it clear that he intended to avoid taking purely partisan positions, either in his campaign or in office if elected. “I still have this high-school civics view of our government,” he said. “The job of leadership is not to divide each other, but to find common ground.”

Making a point of lamenting the attack-ad nature of the Senate contest and other campaigns these days, he said, “I hate what is going on. It‘s not what the founders intended.” He defended both his recent statement that he would have voted to confirm President Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, for the Supreme Court, and a TV ad in which he suggested working closely with the President, “a skilled negotiator,” to bring down drug prices.

“I think people across the spectrum do not want people of one party or another,” he said.
“I believe fundamentally in working together.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Scary Home Companion

Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference between incompetence (or, to be generous, mistakes) and intentionally deceptive behavior.

Take the recent brouhahas regarding the Shelby County ballot, for example. It’s possible to believe that no one at the Election Commission bothered to test the “enlarge type” function on the voting machines, so they were as surprised as the rest of us when some voters discovered that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean’s name was bounced to the second page of the ballot. That would be a mistake, at best.

If the commission did test the “enlarge type” function, saw that Dean’s name got bumped, and thought, “Meh, no big deal,” despite the fact that state law mandates that the minority party’s candidate be listed second on the ballot, well, that would be incompetence, at best. At worst, it would reflect a conscious decision to tilt the scales to Republican candidate Bill Lee, whose name remained atop the ballot no matter the type size.

Rodney Dangerfield

Hard to tell. Though it’s pretty difficult to imagine any sentient election officials thinking such a glitch would go unnoticed and/or uncontested.

Similarly, if you were generous, you could make the case that the three referenda on the ballot for Memphis voters are just worded clumsily. Clumsy verbiage is a mistake. Intentionally confusing language is not, and after trying without success to wrap my brain around the syntax of these fool things, I think it’s pretty clear that the ordinances were intentionally written by the city council and its attorney to confuse voters. They are attempting to extend term limits from two terms to three terms, but they don’t have the courage to ask for it honestly. They are attempting to repeal Instant Runoff Voting before it’s even been implemented. Needless to say, all three proposed ordinances should be handily rejected. This is done by voting “Against,” despite the fact that the Election Commission’s sample ballot instructed voters that their options would be to vote “No” or “Yes.” Just another simple mistake, one can assume. Or not.

Of course, sometimes it’s really easy to tell when someone’s being deceptive, as in the case of President Trump, who makes blatant lying a central element of his persona. It’s not even news anymore. Here’s a recent example: The president said initially that the Saudi arms deal would provide 40,000 jobs. This week, in citing the number of jobs that would be lost if the Saudi deal got cancelled (because of the inconvenient assassination of a journalist), the president claimed it would be 500,000 jobs. The next day, it became 600,000 jobs. The following day, at a rally, Trump claimed a million jobs would be lost.

In 2017, the entire defense-contracting industry in the U.S. employed 375,000 people. The million-jobs claim is utter and complete horse puckey. But here’s the thing: Trump doesn’t care. And that’s because no one in his base or his party holds him accountable. For Trump, lying and exaggeration are features, not a bug.

As I watched clips from Trump’s traveling roadshows this week, I had a revelation: He’s the Garrison Keillor of the deplorables, weaving tales and fables and jokes tailored to their predispositions and fears. Scary Home Companion.

If he says there are Middle Eastern terrorists in the Honduran caravan, his people cheer. He doesn’t have to prove it; he just has to say it. If he says Brett Kavanaugh graduated at the top of his class at Yale, no one will fact-check him, at least no one he cares about. The Diane Feinstein imitations, the one-liners, the nicknames, the comic shrugs, and facial contortions — it’s all part of President Dangerfield’s schtick. It’s meta bloviation — beyond truth — and without parallel in our presidential history.

After seeing all the political vitriol pouring forth on social media, I’ve decided America’s great divide has come down to this: You either buy into Trump’s act, or you think he’s totally full of crap. That’s it. That’s the only issue. We’re a binary country now. Trump has finally succeeded in making everything about him; it’s a narcissist’s wet dream.

So, when considering the candidates for varous offices, ask yourself this question: “Who would Trump vote for?” That ought to clarify things, one way or the other.

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Cover Feature News

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.”)

Categories
News News Blog

Election Machines Can Bump Dean’s Name to Second Page of Ballot

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

JB

Dean at Railgarten

When voters opt to “enlarge type” button on polling machines in Shelby County, gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean’s name gets pushed from the top of the first page of gubernatorial candidates to the second page of candidates, after the many independents also running for the seat. 

Shelby County Election Commission officials said the official order of the listing of candidates’ names comes from the state. Tennessee election law says nominees on ballots here “shall be listed in the following order: majority party, minority party, and recognized minor party, if any.”

That Dean’s name is kicked to a second page, after independents, (when “enlarge type” is pressed) is simply a characteristic of Shelby County voting machines, election officials here said.

They decided to format the ballot that way, they said, because they thought it’d be better to have Dean’s name appear at the top of a page than at the bottom.
[pullquote-1] Dean’s campaign did not immediately respond to questions about the situation, and has not, so far, said anything public about it.

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen did take the matter to social media, saying “this should not have happened.”

Election Machines Can Bump Dean’s Name to Second Page of Ballot

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Political Shakeup in Shelby County Politics

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.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Democrats, NAACP Prevail in Voting-Sites Matter

CREDIT: JB

After what turned out to be virtually an entire day’s worth of testimony from both sides on Monday, Chancellor JoeDae L Jenkins ruled for the plaintiffs JB

John Ryder (l), attorney for the Election Commission, and Alexander Wharton, attorney for the NAACP, joust over a demographic map prepared by witness Steve Ross. Judge JoeDae L. Jenkins would rule for the Shelby County Democratic Party and the NAACP in a dispute over early-voting sites for the August 2 election.

and against the Election Commission, ordering that Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church and Frayser’s Ed Rice Community Center (or some similarly located venue) be added to the three early-voting sites scheduled to open on Friday of this week.

Judge Jenkins also enjoined that all the designated sites (numbering 27 in all, after tonight’s ruling) open on Monday, June 16th, instead of Wednesday, June 18th, as the Election Commission and Election Administrator Linda Phillips had planned, giving the Shelby County Democratic Party and the NAACP the essence of what they sought. The early-voting period is scheduled to last from June 13th to June 28th, with final voting to be held on the officiaL election day of August 2nd.

Monday’s decision was loaded with ironies. The Election Commission had ignited what became a county-wide controversy when it arbitrarily and without advance public notice announced in June that it was expanding the original list of 21 early-voting sites (the same as that employed for the May county primary), adding five new sites in what it termed “under-served” areas, most of them in historic Republican territory. The EC further designated the AgriCenter in Shelby Farms as a super-site, open for four extra days. (A “compromise” offer by the commission last Friday would have substituted three other extra-time sites, including one in a heavily Democratic area.)

Judge Jenkins turned that logic on its head, saying in his ruling from the bench that it was African-American areas that were under-served by the new configuration, and to arguments from Election Commission lawyer John Ryder and EC spokesperson Joe Young that there was no time left to effect any more changes or provide for an earlier availability for the sites, the Chancellor would rule that the commission had erred in the first place by springing its own changes on to the public without adequate notice or preparation.

All the parties will reconvene in Chancellor Jenkins’ courtroom on Tuesday at 10 a.m. to get written notice of the judge’s ruling, and attorneys for the Election Commission have indicated they will seek an interlocutory appeal and a stay of Jenkins’ injunction.

One set of plaintiffs on Monday consisted of Myron Lowery and the Shelby County Democratic Party and was represented by lawyer Julie Byrd Ashworth, the other was the NAACP, represented by brothers Alexander Wharton and Andre Wharton. Ryder did the honors for the Election Commission.

Highlights of the hearing were a lengthy cross-examination of Election Commission chairman Robert Meyers by Alexander Wharton and detailed testimony on the demographics of site selection by witness Steve Ross, who was put on the stand by the plaintiffs.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Back to Paper Ballots

CREDIT: Razihusin | Dreamstime.com

What scares me the most about Russia’s intrusion into our election process are the reports that they may have had access to our voter rolls, voting booths, and voting results. This hacking into our computer voting mechanisms has been a concern of many for quite some time.

This country made a decision years ago to computerize our voting system. It’s not because it is more accurate. It’s certainly not quicker, and it’s definitely not more efficient. In the last three election cycles in Memphis, we waited until long after 10 p.m. for any results, and it was after midnight before we knew who won. It’s a scary mess.

Razihusin | Dreamstime.com

Before I was elected to two terms on the Memphis City Council, I unsuccessfully ran in 1977 for the same seat. The voting mechanism was not computerized. It was the old system, where voters went into a voting booth, pulled the switch to close the curtain, flipped the voting levers, then pulled the red switch to record the vote.

At 7 p.m., when the polls closed, the voting officials pulled the lever at the back of the booth and the final totals were spit out on a paper tally, much like a cash register tape. All the totals from the machines in each precinct were added together and the final results were phoned in by the precinct chairman to Election Central. Candidates were allowed to have a poll watcher witness the total being tabulated and phone them in to their candidate’s headquarters. The candidates knew whether they had won or lost by 7:30 p.m.

It was quick, efficient, honest, and had credibility.

Where are we today? Computerization has not made it quicker, nor more efficient, and we are now learning there is a real potential for dishonesty by hacking the vote. Most importantly, the system lacks credibility. Because of the possibility of hacking, confidence in the system is being destroyed. And once the people lose faith in the credibility of their voting system, democracy goes by the wayside.

This is not a partisan issue. Concerns about the lack of credibility in the system have been expressed by both parties. Never before have we heard the phrase “rigged election” expressed so often in campaigns.

Not only does credibility go, we are spending a fortune on these high-powered, inefficient, Rube Goldberg machines, when more reliable results can be achieved much quicker, far cheaper, and with the utmost credibility by the former system.

Yes, it’s time we go back to the old lever machines or, better yet, paper ballots. If a precinct has 3,000 votes with 12 precinct workers, the votes could be counted and verified in 30 minutes. There would also be a paper trail, should questions arise.

France uses a paper ballot system. In that country’s recent national elections, the votes were tallied and the result was known before midnight. Similarly, Canada uses only paper ballots for its national and provincial elections — ballots that afford each party the opportunity to inspect the counting.

Americans believe we’ve become so sophisticated with our computerization, polling, and exit polling, but all this really does is allow the media to project a winner five minutes before one of its competitors. The credibility and sanctity of the ballot far outweighs the importance of this media silliness.

It’s now time for the public to actively urge our Election Commission and state and federal legislators to immediately pass legislation mandating a return to the simplest, most efficient, most honest, and cheapest means to vote. And that’s the paper ballot and our former voting machines.

We know hackers can steal credit card information by walking by a user of an ATM. Do we believe the voting system that’s in place is not as vulnerable?

Our democracy is too precious to put it in the hands of politically motivated parties, rival nations, or angry computer hackers and geeks.

John Vergos served two terms on the Memphis City Council and has been active in Memphis and Shelby County politics for decades.