Tag: Shelby County Election Commission

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Schadenfreude at the Polls

Can you die from an overdose of schadenfreude? Asking for a friend.

There’s a lot of schadenfreude (a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people) going around these days, mostly among Democrats, who are gleefully watching the Republicans fight among themselves about Donald Trump.

But with the election still more than 90 days away, it would behoove Democrats and other “never Trumpers” to keep their eyes on the prize. Candidates stumble and misspeak. Domestic and international developments can sway non-committed voters. Third-party candidates can impact close contests in swing states. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that computer hacks (foreign and domestic) are in play. Crazier things than a Trump turnaround have happened in the long history of American presidential politics.

I witnessed a bit of schadenfreude at my polling station last Thursday. As I was waiting for poll officials to determine my residency (more on that later), a woman approached the table to vote. Forgive me for stereotyping, but she appeared to be a classic grande dame, a well-dressed Southern lady of a certain age. Her accent was deeply Southern, even aristocratic. When asked her party affiliation, she said “Republican,” her tone indicating that such a question was rather unneccessary.

The poll-worker, a crisply efficient black woman, then said, “I’ll need to see a driver’s license or other photo ID.” And that’s when things got interesting.

“Well, I don’t drive anymore,” the woman said, “so I don’t have a driver’s license. And I don’t have a photo ID.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” the poll-worker said, “but state law requires that we see a photo ID.”

“But I’ve been voting here for decades,” the woman said, her outrage growing. “They’ve never asked me for a photo ID.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. We have no choice. Do you have a passport?”

“Well, yes, of course, but it’s at home and my son is picking me up here.”

“Sorry, Ma’am.”

The woman blustered and complained and fussed some more. Finally, with perhaps just the slightest hint of irony, the poll-worker asked, “Do you have a handgun carry permit?”

“No, I do not! And I just think I’m going to leave!”

And so, thanks to our state’s photo-ID law, another undocumented immigrant (in a brilliant disguise) was denied a vote. Well played, GOP. Well played.

I took no joy from this, honestly. The woman obviously had a right to vote. And so did I, or, at least, I thought I did. But thanks to our crack Shelby County Election Commission, I, too, was initially denied. After voting at the same location for eight years, my name was no longer on my neighborhood precinct voting rolls. I was told if I wanted to vote, I’d have to journey to another precinct’s polling place, a couple of miles away — nowhere near my house. After much bitching, I gave up and drove over there and voted. If I’d not had a car, I’d have been out of luck.

Afterwards, I went home and checked the Election Commission precinct map, which is a real piece of work (see sample above). Many major streets (i.e. Peabody, Central, Belvedere) are listed as “no name,” and the precinct lines are difficult to discern. But after looking closely at the map, it was clear that my proper polling place was still the one I’d always gone to. The EC had arbitrarily and incorrectly moved me elsewhere to vote.

I have no idea how such a thing could happen — or why my name was plucked out of a computer’s list of voters and moved to a precinct where I don’t live. I do know that Election Commission screw-ups are now routine with every election in Shelby County, and the system needs a major overhaul, pronto. Come November, the stakes are too high for incompetence.

And replace that stupid map.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter From the Editor, “Have Yourselves an Angry Little Christmas” …

George Bailey saved the town of Bedford Falls by being born in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. I have faith that many voters born in America will save this country from the loose cannon that is Donald Trump.

Every year, since I was 10, I have watched It’s a Wonderful Life during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. I love the main characters, played by Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, but this year, the mean-spirited, greedy character, Henry Potter (the grouchy man in the wheelchair), jumped out in my mind as comparable to Trump.

As the story goes, a second-class angel working to become a first-class angel with wings reveals to George Bailey that the town Bedford Falls would have become Pottersville (named after Potter) if George had not been born. Pottersville was full of ruined lives and self-indulgent people. Just think, if by some freak of serendipity Donald Trump did become the President of the United States, his over-inflated ego might entertain the idea of changing the name of the USA to the U.S. of Trump’s World. Casinos and racism would rule the day. 

Alfred Waddell

About Bianca Phillips’ cover story on Evan Hurst, “The Snarkiest Man in Memphis” …

I love this man! I first met him when he was a kid selling Cutco knives. He dropped into my Midtown business (cold call) and ended up selling me a thing or two to add to my Cutco collection.

I love his brain and his writing. It’s refreshing to read something on point and funny at the same time. He keeps me laughing! Great article. And congrats, Evan!

Theresa Andreuccetti

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column …

As much as I respect Jackson Baker, I think he has missed the story in Richard Holden’s resignation from the Shelby County Election Commission. I take personal umbrage at the statement, “There often seemed to be a good deal of overreach by Holden’s critics, and no doubt partisan motives played a role in his tribulations, as did a general need to find a scapegoat for problems and circumstances beyond the province of a single individual.”

I am a Democratic partisan, but the problems I have been involved with with the SCEC are basic voter rights issues regardless of party affiliation. Nor has there been overreach. Baker is correct in that these errors are probably beyond a single individual.

But that begs the point. That means the other individuals responsible for the abysmal performance of the SCEC are still in place. The media has not reported on the serious questions arising out of the October 18th election. We now have the Democratic commissioners saying they do not trust the results put out by the SCEC. This gives the lie to the contention that all is well because both parties watch each other. The Democratic Party representatives have said they are excluded from the process and that basically the results represent the unopposed actions of the three Republicans.

In the meantime, the SCEC investigates nothing. They have yet to explain the 2012 debacle nor the 2015 mishap. Most seriously, they have failed to address the repeated failures of their systems to detect errors before machines go out live to the voters. This failure literally means that no member of the SCEC can guarantee that we have used legitimate ballots in the last several elections.

This is not an overreach. It is the federal standard of care for election administration. We also do not run mock elections prior to the election to test the vote. Nor do they run parallel testing during elections. And they do no post-election audits. In short, we have almost no safeguards that protect the integrity of the ballot or the results. And that does not even get into the fraud involved with certifying these election machines by the state.

I intend to stay around and observe the current gang that couldn’t shoot straight — the Republican members of the SCEC.

Joseph Weinberg

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Election Commission Zigs; County Commission Zags

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Rich Holden

The announcement Monday by Rich Holden of his decision to retire as Shelby County Election Commission administrator at the end of the year belongs to the category of events that are both surprising and instantly seen as inevitable, once they occur.

For years Holden has borne the brunt of virtually nonstop criticism for a seemingly endless series of glitches and issues that have bedeviled the county’s electoral process. These have run the gamut from the issuance of ballots improperly matched up with the appropriate districts to snarls in vote-counting to what critics charged was a disregarding of quirks in the county’s voting machines.

At various times, Holden was the recipient of sanctions from the Election Commission itself, votes of no confidence by the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission, and demands by local elected officials for federal investigations of his office.

Holden’s problems began as far back as the time of his appointment in 2009 by a commission that had become newly majority-Republican in the previous election cycle, when the state House of Representatives tipped over to GOP control.

Since the Senate had already come under a Republican majority, that made the GOP the state’s official majority party, and Tennessee law provides that not only the state Election Commission but each of the 95 county election commissions shall consist of a 3-2 majority in favor of the party which controls the legislature.

For decades, that fact resulted in anomalies like the presence of pretend-Democrats in control of election commissions in several ancestrally Republican East Tennessee counties where there were as many actual Democrats as there were aardvarks.

In Shelby County, however, the two parties had for some time coexisted in a condition of rough equivalence, and the change-over from Democratic to Republican control in the administration of elections had the potential of controversy under the best of circumstances.

And that fact was accentuated in 2009 by a fast-track post-election effort of the new GOP majority on the county Election Commission to transition Holden, who had been a Republican member of the commission, into the administrator’s job, which had long been held by Democratic CAO James Johnson.

The move was initially staved off by a statement of caution from former state Attorney General Robert Cooper, but would eventually come to pass, with Holden acceding to the position of administrator and Johnson becoming a Democratic commission member.

The newly configured commission hit a bump with the 2010 county election, the first major partisan election under the new management, when an apparent electronic glitch erroneously recorded thousands of potential election-day voters as already having cast ballots in the early-voting period, with hundreds of them being turned away before the problem was discovered and corrected.

Given that the slate of Republican candidates swept that election over their Democratic opponents, the losing Democrats thought they smelled a fish and sued to have the results overturned. They were supported by a series of itemized charges— some of them alleging chicaneries that seemed fanciful enough for a James Bond saga — from Black Box Voting, an out-of-state watchdog organization.

The list of allegations was pruned down to a series of possible technical irregularities before trial, and then-Chancellor Arnold Goldin dismissed the plaintiffs’ suit as not meeting the standards for declaring the election result “incurably uncertain,” as required for the trial to be pursued. The numerical gaps between winner and loser had, in any case, seemed far larger than could have been affected by the election-day glitch.

But the seeds of suspicion had sprouted, and the almost dependable eruption of new glitches in election after election ever since has done little to restore trust between the two parties vis-à-vis the election process.

The basis of contention shifted in the course of time from suspicion of fraud to simple negligence or mismanagement, and the spotlight shifted away from members of the commission itself to Holden. Following the mismatching of thousands of races to precincts in ballots issued in the August 2012 county election, the commission members, Democrats and Republicans alike, agreed to put Holden on six-month probation.

He emerged with his job intact, but allegations and complaints continued, from Democratic members of the commission and self-appointed watchdogs like Steve Ross and Joe Weinberg. Most recently, Weinberg made a point of publicizing a new case of apparent wrong ballots being issued to specific voters, this one based on a challenge originally raised by John Marek, one of the losing candidates in the recent election for the Memphis City Council’s District 5.

And state Representative G.A. Hardaway had of late gone so far as to call for a criminal investigation of Holden.

There often seemed to be a good deal of overreach by Holden’s critics, and no doubt partisan motives played a role in his tribulations, as did a general need to find a scapegoat for problems and circumstances beyond the province of a single individual. And, though generally good-natured and uncomplaining, the husky ex-Marine sometimes evinced a stubbornness in the face of complaints that others found frustrating.

In any case, Holden is at last off the hot seat. The five-member Election Commission, so often at odds with itself, will now have to agree on a successor.

• The Shelby County Commission, another local body accustomed to a fair amount of contentiousness, eased into its annual holiday break with a Monday meeting that lacked any of the clashes between members that have become routine, and, for the time being, avoided as well any resumption of the commission’s ongoing conflict with the administration of county Mayor Mark Luttrell.

And, as a result of the defeat at Wednesday’s committee sessions of a resolution from Commissioner Steve Basar requiring approval by the county commission and city council of any potential merger of the city/county Economic Development and Growth Engine Board (EDGE) with the Community Redevelopment Agency, Basar had withdrawn his resolution from Monday’s agenda.

The main order of business for the commission on Monday was to approve further incremental grants to community organizations, projects, and charities deemed to be deserving by members of the commission acting under their recently adopted license to dispense such lagniappes on a district-by-district basis.

One indication of Monday’s laid-back pre-holiday mood came in the form of a quip from commission chairman Terry Roland to Luttrell’s CAO, Harvey Kennedy, who had previously complained that the microphone at his desk in the well of the commission auditorium was malfunctioning.

“Well, Cap, you see we got your button fixed, and you don’t even need to use it,” cracked Roland, during a lull in proceedings. (The breeziness of addressing Kennedy, a former Navy captain, as “Cap” was an interesting indicator of the commission’s relations with the administration, as well.)

The lack of action Monday on either the EDGE issue or the conflict between the commission and the administration does not mean that either is a closed matter, of course. There will doubtless be further actions on the commission (and on the city council, as well) to revise the terms of the relationship with EDGE so as to give members of the legislative bodies more active say on industrial recruitment matters than their presence on the EDGE board as ex officio members currently allows.

And there are ongoing discussions behind the scenes to break the stalemate over the commission’s wish to complete the installation of former Commissioner Julian Bolton to act as an independent attorney on behalf of the commission. Basically, the commission insists on the basis of the County Charter that it has that right; Luttrell and County Attorney Ross Dyer insist on the basis of the self-same charter that they do not.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

THDA’s Mission

If the new mortgage rate for first-time home-buyers in Shelby County has gone up of late — and it has, a fact important as a juicer for the economy as a whole — much of the credit for that belongs to Ralph Perrey, executive director of the Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA), a state agency whose reason for being is to spur such growth.

As Perrey put it on a visit to Memphis on Monday, “The economy comes back when housing comes back, and housing comes back when the first-time buyer returns to the market.”

After years of explosive housing growth in the Nashville area, particularly in the state capital’s surrounding, so-called “donut” counties, Perrey’s mission just now is to ramp up home-buying in West Tennessee and East Tennessee to an equivalent level.

At this point, about 20 percent of THDA’s mortgage business is in Memphis. Up until now, the surrounding donut counties have accounted for a majority of it.

THDA, which was created by the state of Tennessee some 43 years ago, is self-funding and operates within the context of the general housing market and, as an issuer of mortgage loans, plays by the rules of that market. But it serves an overtly public purpose, not only accelerating the growth and accessibility of housing but applying its profits to other useful ends.

Perrey, a baseball fan who watches games wherever he goes, dissertated on the functions of his office at AutoZone Park Monday night, between pitches of the game between the Memphis Redbirds and the Colorado Springs Sky Sox.

“What we hope to do is build our business,” Perrey said. “With every additional loan, if we do our work well, it helps us support more activities through our housing trust fund. We manage nine different federal programs. Here in Memphis, there’s a lot of interest in what you can do to eliminate blight and get rid of eyesores. 

“We’re negotiating with the U.S. Department of the Treasury to use some leftover foreclosure [-prevention] money. We committed all of it we had, but some of it, an unneeded portion, was returned to us. We think, by the fall, we’ll have a few million dollars to use against blight, and that could be very impactful to certain areas of Memphis.”

Before heading to the ball park, Perrey had spent an afternoon hobnobbing with mortgage bankers from the tri-state area, who are holding their annual convention here. “As we tell people, we are being more aggressive in engaging with lenders. That combination has really made a difference. Our loan product is up 58 percent compared to last year,” Perrey said.

THDA’s “main line,” explained Perrey, is to finance single-family mortgages, which the agency buys from the originating lenders and then administers, with a marginal savings for the home-buyer. “For the lenders, it’s a market-expanding opportunity. We give them a product they can use for customers they might otherwise say no to.” The term “public-private partnership” has gotten a pretty good workout in policy circles in recent years, and it adequately describes the way THDA operates.

“We provide backup,” is how Perrey puts it. “We’re not a poverty program, but we do make it possible for people of limited means to have their own homes, so long as they can demonstrate a certain financial capacity. But we’re not just for poor people.” 

He said that THDA also facilitates loans for people well into what could be described as middle class, such as start-up couples “who may think they don’t have a good enough credit score or are worried about the down payment.”

At present, TDHA can offer a 30-year fixed-rate loan at a 3.99 percentage rate, marginally better than the market at large, and can also offer down-payment closing assistance.

In other words, THDA doesn’t do hand-outs, but it provides a hand up for people in all economic circumstances who, for various reasons, might need a bit of help in getting what they want out of the housing market. Because the agency’s standards for lending include a demonstration of solvency, it has a very low delinquency rate with its loans. “We think there are a lot of people in Tennessee who would qualify for a THDA mortgage, and that’s why we’re here,” said Perrey, who said TDHA will offer a newly configured loan package sometime this summer especially tailored for credit unions and other lenders who may not deal with FHA loans per se.

Perrey is a product of Republican politics, having left a career as a radio newsman to serve former Congressman and Governor Don Sundquist as his entrée into government. But he sees himself as working within the stream of a bipartisan tradition. “There isn’t that much difference in how Republican and Democratic administrations have dealt with THDA. There’s been a great deal of continuity. Everybody likes housing.”

It’s nice to know, especially these days, that some aspects of government are above politics. As Ralph Perrey tells it, the Tennessee Housing Development Agency is one of them.

• Hackles were raised in Democratic Party circles in 2014 over former party Chairman Sidney Chism‘s overt and enthusiastic support of the reelection of Sheriff Bill Oldham, who ran as the Republican nominee. The Shelby County Democratic Executive Committee went so far as to formally censure Chism for not only endorsing Oldham but for allegedly attempting to dissuade the eventual Democratic candidate, Bennie Cobb, from running against him.

Now Chism, a former Shelby County commissioner who was term-limited and could not run again in 2014, is employed by Oldham as a “public information specialist,” and Chism is once again undergoing scrutiny. As part of the commission’s preliminary budget process, the Sheriff’s Department presented its financial prospectus back in mid-April, but the department’s employment of Chism and former county preparedness director, Bob Nations, prompted a callback before the commission’s budget committee on Wednesday of this week.

Budget Committee Chair Heidi Shafer said that further information was needed in the case of both Chism and Nations, the latter of whom, she said, had not become fully vested for pension purposes but would achieve that status in the sheriff’s employ.

“We just want to know if these jobs are really needed in light of the substantial increases the Sheriff’s Departent is seeking elsewhere,” said Shafer.

Also subject to a callback for further accounting on Wednesday were Juvenile Court and the Shelby County Election Commission. Shafer professed a concern over a request for $200,000 as a consultant’s fee to look into revising current election procedures, as well as the Election Commission’s request for a six percent raise in compensation for its emplyees.

“Not many Shelby Countians would find it easy to believe that the Election Commission deserves merit raises,” Shafer said.

• As of Friday, persons interested in filling the Super District, Position 2 seat (if not the shoes) of influential Councilman Shea Flinn, who has resigned, were able to pick up papers at the council office. Applications are due by Thursday, May 14th, and the remaining 12 council members will choose an interim replacement for Flinn’s seat on Tuesday, May 19th.

It will take a majority of seven votes to name the fill-in council member, and that could result in several ballots.

Indications are that all or nearly all of the individuals who had previously drawn petitions to run for the seat in the October 8th election will attempt to gain the interim nod as well. It’s one of those nothing-to-lose situations.

But, given the fact that sitting council members may not wish to offend a possible future colleague by making the wrong choice, they may see as a more appealing option the idea of choosing someone who does not intend to run for the seat in the regular city election. 

Some of those who have already indicated they are candidates for the interim position only are lawyer Alan Crone and activists Frank Triplett and Diane Cambron. That list is sure to grow between now and May 14th.

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.

Categories
Flyer Flashback News

Flyer Flashback: Election Result Challenges

What goes around comes around. You can say it that way, or you can say much the same thing in French.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. That’s a little fancier, but let’s face it: Each of these expressions is a cliché, and they each got that way for the simplest of reasons. Patterns of life don’t change much. Or, to say it yet a third familiar way, there is nothing new under the sun, and there are only so many ways to express that fact.

As we go to press, the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC) — or, to be more exact, the county Election Administrator’s office, which in theory is overseen by the Election Commission, is under suspicion again (again!) for not getting an election right.

A candidate for the Shelby County Commission is challenging the election commission’s unofficial count, which showed him losing a primary action by 26 votes; his own count, derived from photostatted specimens of the tabulated print-outs from each precinct in his district, has him in an exact tie with the presumed winner. Either his or the SCEC’s unofficial count is right. Maybe neither is. In any case, a fair amount of suspense was mounting in advance of  this week’s planned election commission meeting to formally certify results.

Kevin Woods and Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr.

We’ve been here before. In 1974, a box of precinct returns that had somehow gone missing turned up just in time to overturn the already declared outcome of a congressional race. And, in the 25 years of the Flyer‘s existence, uncertainty of election results has been a fact of life.  

In 2006, there was a challenge to several outcomes in the county general election, and in 2010, there was another. In the last case the challenge got hairy, indeed, going on for months as recorded in a score of Flyer articles. (Sample headline from September 17, 2010: “Election Protesters Turn Fury on Consolidation, Public Officials.”)

Each of these situations required a court to rule, and, while the official results were sustained by a court in both of those years, that wasn’t the case in 2012 when (sigh) it happened again. Precinct lines had been drawn wrong for a school board election, and this time, Chancellor Kenny Armstrong, as chronicled in an online Flyer article on Monday, August 19, 2013, declared  invalid (because uncertain) the narrow election victory of Kevin Woods over the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr. in a battle of incumbents who had been forced to run for the same seat in the newly reconfigured Shelby County Schools (SCS) board.

Said His Honor: “The election commission here made no concerted effort to avoid the problems that occurred in this election for school board positions. … These mistakes in assigning so many voters to incorrect school board districts cannot be simply ignored in an effort by the court to not take the step of declaring an election invalid.”

So justice hath prevailed? Maybe, maybe not. Woods, who has gone on serving in the meantime and, in fact, got elected chairman of the SCS board, exercised his right to appeal that verdict, and that process is still underway. It may be that the current contest for the County Commission’s district 10 will meander on for an equally prolonged period, which would really complicate the forthcoming August 7th general election between one of the contending Democrats and a Republican nominee.

Or maybe things got worked out at this week’s election commission meeting, in which case we’re all breathing a sigh, not of exasperation but of relief.

There is still too uncanny a resemblance between the election machines we’ve been using to choose our leaders and the slot machines some of us use to probe for weaknesses in the law of averages.  

Surely there’s a better way to do this democracy thing, but if it keeps on turning up the same old seven and six in election after election, we’re here to report the fact.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Getting the Vote Right in Shelby County

Another Shelby County election, another election controversy. This time, it’s the County Commission race between Reginald Milton and Martavius Jones, where a thin 26-vote margin separates unofficial winner Milton from recount-demander Jones.  

The time’s ripe to finally move to “paper trail” voting machines. In fact, this may be our last chance.

Welcome to the credibility gap: Shelby County’s record of election mishaps is too long to recount here. Highlights include thousands of voters being incorrectly turned away on Election Day (2010) to thousands of voters being given the wrong ballots (2012) to an overturned local election (litigation still pending). A state government audit of our county’s election office concluded that it had “an inability to conduct elections without significant inaccuracies.”

Other than that, though, it’s fine.

The public has a similar lack of confidence in the integrity of our elections, and both the County Commission and Memphis City Council recently passed resolutions saying they had no confidence in the election administrator.

This week, candidate Jones told the Democratic Party’s Primary Board that the election machine “tapes” posted at each polling place tell a different story from the electronic voting machine-generated unofficial count, making the Jones-Milton race a literal tie. The Primary Board then demanded the raw election return data from the Election Commission in an attempt to discover whether Milton really won over Jones. And there’s legal uncertainty over the kind of recount — manual or automatic — that Jones can demand, and when. 

None of this would be an issue if we replaced our purely electronic touch-screen Diebold voting machine system with an “optical scan” voting system that creates a voter-verified hard copy “paper trail.” 

The “optiscan” system would be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken the SAT, the ACT, the TCAP, or any other standardized test. Using a No. 2 pencil, voters fill in bubbles on a “scantron” sheet to mark their candidate preference, and insert the sheet into a machine that electronically scans and records the votes while locking the hard copy sheets away for safekeeping. In the event of a Jones/Milton-like squeaker election, a charge of fraud, or a computer glitch, the hard copies can be compared to the electronic record.

Optiscan is the national trend. In 32 states, it’s either used statewide or for a majority of voters. Nationally, only 1 in 4 voters uses a purely paperless touch-screen system like ours. Here in Tennessee, optiscan has been used successfully for more than a decade in Pickett and Hamilton (Chattanooga) counties.

Not only would optiscan machines keep elections honest and accurate, they would cut waiting time at the polls. At your polling place right now, only three voters at a time can vote, on three different touch-screen machines. With optiscan, 10 voters could take their time at 10 privacy carrels filling out their ballots. When they’re ready, they can then feed their ballot into the machine. Think about that this August, as you wait in line for the voters in front of you to slog their way through the “long ballot,” filled with judicial candidates who come up once every 8 years. 

If we buy now, we can get new machines at half price. Our current voting machines are about 10 years old, and will need to be replaced in the next few years anyway. And right now, millions of dollars of federal funds are sitting in a bank account in Nashville, available for us to help pay for the new machines. These “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA) funds can only be used for election reform. 

But if we don’t ask for them this year, they could be given away to other Tennessee counties. That’s why the Election Commission recently asked an internal county budget committee for $1.5 million in capital funds for optiscan machines, expecting a state HAVA grant match of $2.7 million or so. The Election Commission later withdrew that request in deference to another capital budget project, but it was right the first time. 

Optiscan will require us to pay ongoing paper costs, which can be expensive. But we’ll likely save money in the long run, because you need about one-third fewer optiscan machines than touch-screen machines, with resulting savings in machine maintenance, storage, and transport. 

We need voting-machine reform now more than ever, and this may be our last chance. Tell the County Commission and Election Commission to budget for optiscan this year. The next time there’s a close election, we’ll all be thanking them for it.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About the editorial, “Basar’s Choice” …

Commissioner Basar is to be commended for his practical and reasonable actions regarding the School Board districts, but the Flyer editorial perpetuates misinformation.  

The county commission was advised several times by the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC)over the course of months regarding the urgency and necessity of timely drawing their district lines before the 2012 elections.

State law prohibits precinct lines from crossing county commission lines or state Senate lines (precincts must be wholly within those boundaries, not partially in one district and partially in another). This means that those lines need to be identified before precincts can be accurately drawn. 

In the editorial, it was suggested that the county commission lines were not needed, “because their election was not until 2014 and SCEC could have bypassed the issue … gotten the maps that counted in shape for an error-free election cycle.” There are multiple interdependent steps, each calibrated by the one before, required before precinct designations can be accurately drawn. The editorial further states that “a state investigation and county audit found other reasons.” There was nothing in the county audit regarding this issue. The state, vendors, and consultants worked long hours to unravel the redistrict problem, which was finally completed November 6, 2013.

Dee Nollner

Shelby County Election Commission

About Greg Akers’ article “Civil Discourse” and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ call to engage in conversations concerning racial politics …

How many discussions have been successfully avoided through the use of one term — “race card.” When President Obama stated, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” critics claimed he was exploiting the race card. It seems anytime someone attempts to confront a racial problem, they are said to be using this card. The phrase is not only a way of dodging a discussion, it belittles difficult situations and cheapens conversations.

The race card acts as both a red herring and ad hominem attack. First, as a red herring it distracts from an individual’s actual argument. So instead of talking about the original topic, the discussion becomes about how someone is using the race card – again! The next time a Republican brings up taxes or the national debt, one could simply say they are employing the “conservative card,” and completely circumvent any of their conclusions. As in, “don’t listen to Ted Cruz; he is only using the conservative card.”

I propose that 2014 is the year we stop using the term “race card.” This phrase stands as a road block to civil discourse and real attempts to engage racial politics.

Brandon Chase Goldsmith

Greg Cravens

About ubiquitous Flyer commenter, oldtimeplayer (OTP) …

I think OTP is absolutely brilliant. He is a composite of all the self-absorbed, no-life CA commenters from years past, merely plucking the more controversial statements like petals from a flower. He has created his own web image, the Flyer‘s Max Headroom.

Dave Clancy

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter from the Editor on low pilots’ pay …

They are applying the reverse principle to teaching. Insert cheap recent grads who stay on average 18 months in place of experienced, seasoned teachers with more education.

Homer Simpson

About Chris Davis’ post, “Tom Waits and a Topless Dancer at the Ritz Music Hall in Memphis in 1977” …

I arose from my death bed to attend this show and was healed.

James T. Davis

On Chris Davis’ post, “Pantless Man Cooks Meth in McDonald’s Parking Lot” …

It started with Benghazi!

–Stoopid Guy

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Final Four

Say this for the 2007 incarnation of the Shelby County Election Commission: Its members are trying. Right or wrong, that’s something that various critics doubted about the 2006 version of the commission, plagued by late and lost returns, ineffective software, erratic machines, incorrect election screens, and post-election printouts whose totals were entered in some kind of unintelligible Martian algebra.

“We got started on a rough, rough road,” acknowledged then chairman Greg Duckett, who has moved on since then to the state Election Commission. Another Democratic commissioner, Maura Black Sullivan, was not reappointed by her party’s General Assembly contingent. The Democratic legislators opted to fill the two vacancies with two Democrats who, coincidentally or not, had past grievances related to the commission.

One was Shep Wilbun, a defeated candidate for Juvenile Court clerk who had unsuccessfully challenged the 2006 election results. The other was former longtime commissioner Myra Styles, returning after being purged four years earlier.

Completing the cycle of reconstruction, Styles was promptly named chairman. The third Democrat on the commission was yet another vindicated retread, O.C. Pleasant, who had been replaced as chairman a term earlier by the now-departed Duckett. The two Republican members, Rich Holden and Nancye Hines, were holdovers.

Whether because of improved oversight or simple good luck, the new commission seems to have had better results than their snake-bit predecessors. Concise, easy-to-read reports have been regularly circulated to the media concerning early voting for the four City Council positions that are at stake in Thursday’s runoff elections.

Cumulatively, these reports have yielded the information that, after a sluggish start on October 19th, certain of the 27 early-voting locations had late spurts.

Leading all locations as of Saturday, when early voting ended, was Cordova’s Bert Ferguson Community Center, with 952 voters. A fair amount of voting (282) also occurred at Anointed Temple of Praise, a southeasterly suburban location, suggesting reasonably organized voting in the District 2 contest between Bill Boyd and Brian Stephens.

Heading into Thursday, Stephens, a businessman/lawyer/neighborhood activist with Republican affiliations, was getting a surprising amount of support from influential local Democrats, while longtime political figure Boyd, endorsed by the Shelby County GOP, boasted endorsements from most of the seven other candidates eliminated in general-election voting on October 4th.

Relatively stout voting at Pyramid Recovery Center (544) and Bishop Byrne School (674) indicated the level of voter interest in District 6 (riverfront, South Memphis) and District 3 (Whitehaven), respectively.

The District 6 race was between Edmund Ford Jr. and James O. Catchings, the former a beneficiary of legacy voting habits, the latter depending on support from declared reformists. The District 3 contestants were youngish governmental veteran Harold Collins, who was favored, and educator Ike Griffith.

A turnout of 453 at Raleigh United Methodist Church documented the tight race expected in District 1 between school board member Stephanie Gatewood and teacher Bill Morrison. Gatewood, the only female candidate in the runoff roster, stood to benefit if gender voting patterns, 60 percent female and 40 percent male in early voting, continued on Thursday. Participation in early voting by acknowledged African Americans was at the same level (47.1 percent) as their percentage in the available voting pool. Apparent white participation in early voting was at the level of 37.6 percent, compared to the corresponding figure of 26.3 percent in the pool of registered voters for the four districts.

What made precise demographic reckoning difficult, however, was general confusion as to just who made up the category of voters self-described as “other,” a grouping that accounts for 26.6 percent of the registered-voter pool but only 15.3 percent of early voters.

And what made predictions of any kind difficult was the fact that only 1.5 percent of available registered voters took part in early voting. As always in the case of special elections or runoffs, final victory would belong to whichever candidates mounted the most effective get-out-the-vote efforts.