Meggan Wurzburg Kiel (Photo: instagram @megganformemphis)
Election fever is beginning to show not only at the level of mayoral hopefuls but among city council aspirants as well.
A key race will take place in council District 5, focused on Midtown and East Memphis, where former Councilman Philip Spinosa will be seeking a return to office. It won’t be easy for Spinosa, who’ll be opposed by newcomer Meggan Wurzburg Kiel, whose fundraiser Monday evening at the East Memphis home of Frank and Jeanne Jemison turned out well over a hundred supporters. The attendees ran the gamut from the well-to-do, many of them prominent in business and civic circles, to familiar activists of the political center and center-left.
Kiel ran through her extensive résumé, which includes service in a variety of educational missions among inner-city youth and a prominent role in the Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope (MICAH).
She noted that the council was “kicking the can down the road” in setting exact district boundaries, but urged those present to be ready on May 22nd, when candidate petitions can first be drawn, and “we will sign the petition together and have a really good time picking up officially the campaign.”
• On Saturday, some 100 or so cadres of the Shelby County Republican Party had a dissent-free reorganizing convention in which chairman Cary Vaughn, who was re-elected by acclamation, called for “turning the page” and distancing the party from the monolithic influence of former President Donald J. Trump.
As Vaughn commented to the crowd, “We need boots on the ground. We need new people. … We can’t get there with the same core group. … We have to truly look at how we market the Shelby County GOP. … We have to work on the depth chart, right?”
The chairman cited a recent conversation of his with an African-American acquaintance, who told him, “We as African Americans want to be a part of the Republican Party in Shelby County.” Vaughn quoted the man as saying many Blacks were “pro-life, pro-God, pro-business, pro-traditional marriage, [and] believe in core values. But we’re not coming over under the Trump brand.”
Said Vaughn: “We have to find a way to say, look, there is room for everybody at the table with the Shelby County GOP. Now maybe we tear down the silos just a little bit so that we can come together [and] move this party forward.”
That didn’t sit well with Terry Roland, an absentee Saturday and Trump’s local election chair in both 2016 and 2020. Roland reacted with fury. “There are more Trump [voters] than not” among the county’s Republicans, he said, “and we aren’t taking a back seat to anyone. … Most of us won’t support anyone else, so I’m done with the Shelby County party after 36 years.”
• It is remarkable that Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis’ 9th District was the only Tennessean now serving in Congress that MSNBC could find to say something both sensible and sensitive in the wake of Monday’s fatal school shooting in Nashville.
In a lengthy interview, Cohen empathized with the victims and their families, expressed the need for significant gun-safety legislation (while despairing of finding enough Republicans on Capitol Hill to support it), and even doubted the safety of himself and others in the House, given the inclination of some GOP members to try to smuggle weapons onto the floor.
Nashville is a majority-Democratic city, in some ways more so than Memphis, but gerrymandering by the legislature’s Republican supermajority has contrived to split the state’s congressional districts in such a way that Republicans — like Andy Ogles, who sends out family Christmas cards showing everyone toting a firearm — are guaranteed to represent all the larger districts containing fragments of Nashville.
There were surprises in the voting nationwide, but things in Shelby County and Tennessee went pretty much as expected.
Republican Governor Bill Lee won the smashing re-election victory statewide (1,128,097 to Democrat Jason Martin’s 572,153) that had been expected in a Tennessee landscape that over the past decade and a half has seen yellow-dog Democrats, by and large, replaced by Republican loyalists. But Shelby County’s Democratic coloration was continued and reinforced, as underfunded Democrat Martin won out over Lee by a margin of 108,945 to 86,351.
Other results in Shelby were consistent with the Democrats’ majority in both Memphis and the county overall. Democratic congressman Steve Cohen, whose 9th District lies wholly within Shelby County, easily defeated the GOP’s Charlotte Bergman 92,274 to 29,804 with three other candidates sharing smaller shares of the vote.
Republican David Kustoff, whose 8th district contains upscale portions of Shelby County as well as extensive sections of rural West Tennessee, also triumphed over Democratic nominee Lynette Williams, with 155,534 votes to 51,077 votes, with scattered votes for others. In Shelby County, Kustoff overtook Williams by 48,837 to 19,996.
In state Senate races, Democrat Raumesh Akbari, who was unopposed for re-election in District 29, had 30,189 votes. In District 31, Republican Brent Taylor defeated Democratic contender Ruby Powell-Dennis by a vote of 45,275 to 23,033. In District 33, Democratic incumbent London Lamar defeated Republican Frederick D. Tappan, with independent Hastina D. Robinson polling 512.
Unopposed candidates winning re-election in the House were Democrats Joe Towns Jr. in District 84, Jesse Chism in District 85, Karen Camper in District 87, Larry Miller in District 88, Torrey Harris in District 91, G.A. Hardaway Sr. in District 93, Dwayne Johnson in District 96, and Antonio Parkinson in District 98; Republicans Mark White in District 83 and Tom Leatherwood in District 99.
Winners of contested House races included the late Barbara Cooper, a Democrat, over independent Michael Porter, 7,999 to 2,942, Republican Kevin Vaughan over Democrat Patricia Causey 17,935 to 6,092, and Republican John Gillespie over Democrat Toniko S. Harris in District 96, 12,083 to 9,214.
The victory of Cooper, who died recently, means that the Election Commission will call a special new election to decide the seat.
In Bartlett, David Parsons won a hotly contested mayor’s race over rival candidates Steven Brent Hammonds, John Lackey, and Kevin Quinn. Elected to alderman’s positions were Harold Brad King, Robert Griffin, and David Reaves. School Board winners were Erin Elliott Berry and Bryan Woodruff.
Winners of alderman’s races in Collierville were Maureen Fraser, Billy Patton, and Missy Marshall. School Board winners were Wanda Chism and Keri Blair.
In Germantown, Mayor Mark Palazzolo, who was unopposed, won re-election with 14,011 votes. Victorious in alderman’s races were Scott Sanders and Mary Ann Gibson. School Board winners were Daniel Chatham and Angela Rickman Griffith. Elected mayor in Lakeland by 3,432 votes was Josh Roman, who was unopposed. Connie McCarter was elected commissioner, and Laura Harrison was elected to the school board.
There was a full slate of candidates in Millington’s municipal election. Elected alderman were Bethany Huffman, Al Bell, Chris Ford, and Larry Dagen. School board winners were Cody Childress, Mandy Compton, Dabby Clifton, and Brian McGovern.
Winner of a special election for Position 4 on the Memphis City Council was Jana Swearengen-Washington. Emerging first in a large field of candidates for Municipal Court Judge in Memphis was Varonica Cooper.
There were four amendments to the state constitution on the ballot, all gaining approval both locally and nationwide. Most controversial was an amendment enshrining “right-to-work” in the constitution. Another provides for an emergency means of succession of gubernatorial powers through the legislature’s two speakers. Another amendment would allow members of the clergy to hold legislative office, and yet another formally abolishes the practice of slavery in Tennessee in any form.
The election of August 4, 2022, in Shelby County will likely go down in history for more reasons than the length of its ballot, the longest in local history.
Some 31 years since a political revolution occurred in the county’s core city of Memphis, electing an African-American mayor and broadening the concept of both citizenship and officialdom, a similar process is about to occur in Shelby County at large.
The county will still be the site of six suburban municipalities that are predominantly white in population and Republican in disposition, but these enclaves — their populations inflated by a generation of evacuees from the earlier transformation of Memphis — will now be subject to a governing apparatus that is increasingly diversified and bent on reform.
Shelby County already had a Black chief executive, Mayor Lee Harris, who had launched a number of initiatives designed to extend opportunity and ameliorate the lot of the county’s traditional underclass.
As a result of the election, the mayor’s partners in power will include a legislative body, the Shelby County Commission, whose 13 members will have a Black and female majority and a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of 9 to 4; a Juvenile Court judge who is the scion of African-American civil rights pioneers; and a Democratic district attorney general who, though white like the Republican DA he defeated, has declared an agenda that targets the residual racial inequities of the county’s criminal justice system.
Tennessee state government has become as inflexibly Republican and Trump-dominated as much of the rest of the old Confederacy and, via intensified assertion of its authority on home-rule local governments, has managed to suppress the influence of the state’s urban centers. Nashville had been a bastion of progressivism and New South sensibilities, but the capital city saw ruthless state gerrymandering in January that drastically reduced its legislative capacity and virtually scuttled its hundred-year tradition of electing Democrats to Congress.
As Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen, almost surely destined to be the state’s last surviving Democratic member of the U.S. House, foresaw back in the spring, Nashville’s loss would mean a potential gain in leadership possibilities for the Memphis area, where a Black majority made such disenfranchisement of its political base impractical. Among other things, Shelby County now becomes, post-election, a kind of laboratory for governmental experimentation.
The Democrats elected and re-elected last week are free to propose remedies not only to legacies of neglect in Shelby County government but also to the increasing arrogation of power to a Republican-dominated state government.
Consider only the three top-of-the-ticket officials newly confirmed by voters — Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, District Attorney General Steve Mulroy, and Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon.
Candidates Mulroy, Harris, and Sugarmon, with former NAACP head Johnnie Turner, make last-minute pilgrimage to a statue of Ida B. Wells.
All are long-term Democrats with specific ideas for new agendas. (Technically, Sugarmon’s office is nonpartisan, and accordingly he ran without party label, as, for that matter, did his defeated opponent, current — now outgoing — Judge Dan Michael, who essentially was considered a Republican.)
Harris, who invoked “segregation” as the county’s most severe problem during his first race for mayor in 2018, has bent his efforts toward the abolition of racial and economic disparities affecting the county’s underserved population. He has pioneered in the issue of criminal justice reform, in the establishment of re-entry programs for first-time offenders, and in the creation of a new Juvenile Justice Center. He has shown a willingness to take on the establishment’s sacred cows, as when he vetoed funding for a posh new swimming facility at the University of Memphis, holding to his opposition long enough to extract a pledge from university officials to move toward a $15-an-hour pay for all employees, the same plateau he has instituted for county workers.
Harris’ Republican opponent in the recent election, Memphis City Councilman Worth Morgan based his well-financed campaign on the idea that “we deserve better,” though he never was able to articulate any specifics behind that and other pleasantly-put platitudes.
The final vote was 78,552 for Harris to Morgan’s 56,789 and might have been larger, had Harris turned on the jets full-blast. The bottom line was, he didn’t need to.
A major background issue in the campaign, largely unvoiced, was the tension that had prevailed between county government and the state at the height of the Covid pandemic. Early difficulties in the county’s administering of vaccines were one problem; the state’s insistence on overriding home-rule medical authority, hardened and codified into law during a special legislative session, was another.
It is widely assumed that Harris’ future political ambitions run to a congressional bid down the line; it is less well-known that he has also thought of running for governor and, in fact, had considered that idea, among others, before opting for a second mayoral term.
That mayoral race was run, more or less, as a partnership with the campaign of Mulroy for district attorney general. Candidates Harris and Mulroy, who had served together on the law faculty of the University of Memphis, shared a busy campaign headquarters at the intersection of Poplar and Highland, and there was generous overlap between them at the supporter and strategic levels, as well.
The district attorney’s race became the marquee event to the county election campaign, and there were several reasons for that — one obvious one being that DA Amy Weirich was the last possessor of a county elective office for the Republican Party, which, for most of the time in the era of partisan county elections, had been predominant locally.
That trend ran counter to the fact that demographics — notably, in the growing African-American percentage of the county population — were increasingly favorable to Democrats. The GOP, which led the way toward partisan elections in 1992, had been able to do well on the strength of good candidates with crossover platforms. By 2018, the year of the “blue-wave” election, locally as well as nationally, the county’s Democrats had developed that knack, while Republicans, saddled with Trumpism, had drifted toward ideological extremism.
Mulroy — articulate, self-assured, and a demon for work — had been an active political force for years, leading crusades ranging from reforms in the mechanics of voting to efforts to maintain the Libertyland amusement park and its legendary Zippin Pippin roller coaster.
Mulroy promises new age of fairness as Democrats sweep.
He served from 2006 to 2014 on the Shelby County Commission and hazarded a race for county mayor, losing in the Democratic primary to Deidre Malone.
As he liked to say, he had served in “the Bill Clinton Justice Department” and had experience in both the prosecution and defense aspects of criminal law. Highly active and respected as an academic scholar, Mulroy had ambitions to serve as a federal judge but, as a white male liberal, didn’t check the requisite number of boxes for an appointment in either Democratic or Republican administrations.
In local Democratic ranks, his credentials were considered nigh to perfect for the DA’s race, however, and, after coming out ahead in a three-way primary race, he threw himself into the general election showdown with Weirich, brandishing an agenda for reform that jibed with that of Harris and reflected cutting-edge ideas in legal and law-enforcement circles.
Weirich, though not anybody’s idea of an ideologue, styled herself as “Our DA” and campaigned as a law-and-order traditionalist concerned essentially with victims and their rights. She had financial assets of close to a million dollars for the campaign, but other numbers worked against her. For one thing, political affiliations in Shelby County were top-heavy for Democrats, and the early voting especially was in sync with that.
One set of numbers had especially adverse implications for the incumbent — those indicating a continuing upward climb in the crime rate, especially for crimes of violence, during her 11-year tenure. Mulroy was not shy about mentioning that fact and carried with him on the stump a cardboard graphic with bars depicting the steady rise.
For her part, Weirich launched an ad campaign depicting Mulroy, without explicit evidence, as a Defund the Police activist. Mulroy responded with ads noting the incumbent had been officially reprimanded more than once for judicial misconduct and called her the “worst” district attorney in the state.
In a series of debates, the two candidates lambasted each other.
There were genuine differences on the issues, with Mulroy outlining a progressive agenda seeking, among other things, reforms of the cash-bail system, a post-conviction review procedure, and a reduction in the number of juveniles whose cases were remanded to Criminal Court. He also vowed to amend what he saw as a disparity in the DA’s office, in which 80 percent of the attorneys were white and 95 percent of the accused in their caseloads were Black. He opposed “truth-in-sentencing,” which eliminated parole for certain violent felonies, while Weirich celebrated its codification into state law.
Late in the contest, what might have become a test case occurred on the matter of juvenile transfers. A youth whom Weirich had put on a restorative justice regime backslid and committed a brutal carjacking murder of Autura Eason-Williams, a revered local Methodist cleric. Both candidates were on the spot; almost reflexively, Weirich sought a transfer of the youth to adult court, while Mulroy fished somewhat inconclusively for a proper rhetorical response.
The moment passed, and so did a brief sensation arising from Weirich’s decision to be interviewed on “truth-in-sentencing” by “shock jock” Thaddeus Matthews, who had an harassment case pending that technically would call on her to prosecute.
In the end, Mulroy would win with surprising ease, polling 76,280 votes to Weirich’s 59,364.
Still, Mulroy’s victory, like Harris’, came somewhat as expected, and for all the Sturm und Drang of the DA race, for all the late money Mulroy got from a national network of criminal justice reformers, allowing him to compete on equal terms for advertising time, his margin of victory might simply have been owing to the superfluity of blues over reds in the voting population. More uncertain for most of the campaign season was the fate of the third member of the de facto reformist triad, Tarik Sugarmon.
The 2022 campaign was the second race for Juvenile Court judge by Sugarmon, who had run unsuccessfully in 2014 against incumbent Dan Michael, a loyalist in the administrations of former longtime Judge Kenneth Turner and Turner’s successor, Curtis Person. By 2022, Sugarmon was a judge himself, having won election to Memphis Municipal Court in the meantime, but he still hankered for the job of Juvenile Court Judge.
The son of civil rights pioneer Russell Sugarmon and the brother of Erika Sugarmon, who won a race for the Shelby County Commission in the May Democratic primary, Sugarmon believed, like the other two members of his de facto triad, that Black youths had been badly served by the existing social and judicial systems. At a joint press conference held in June in which he was endorsed by Harris and Mulroy, Sugarmon actually reached into the past and unexpectedly espoused a scheme, first advanced by then County Commissioner Mulroy and others in 2007, to double the number of Juvenile Court judges in order to deal with an ever-mounting caseload.
The proposal, when made in 2007, would have replaced one in which the Juvenile Court judge of record was assisted by 12 appointed referees or magistrates who actually tried cases and dealt with offenders. It was a system dictated originally by the fact that Judge Turner did not have a law degree and could not fully function in the judicial sense. The second-judge concept was approved by the County Commission at the time but brushed aside later by a state appeals court. Sugarmon, who had researched the matter, believes it can be successfully revived by the new group of county commissioners. It remains to be seen if he — and they — will try again.
In any case, the trio of Harris, Mulroy, and Sugarmon, who triumphed in a four-candidate race, edging out Michael by 10,000 votes, can be expected to proceed with an era of reforms in their respective jurisdictions.
Cordova Commission winner Shante Avant waves to well-wisher.
And something of the sort can surely be expected of the newly elected County Commission. Early in the current century, this 13-member body was dominated by seven white male Republicans. Come September, the body will number nine Democrats and four Republicans; eight Blacks and five whites; seven women and six men; seven returnees and six neophytes (though the firebrand Henri Brooks, back for a second run, should perhaps not be so described).
No longer will the balance of power be held by what has been called a white patriarchy. For the record, the names of the new commissioners are as follows, those of incumbents in caps:
District 1, AMBER MILLS, R
District 2, DAVID BRADFORD, R
District 3, MICK WRIGHT, R
District 4, BRANDON MORRISON, R
District 5, Shante Avant, D
District 6, Charlie Caswell, D
District 7, Henri Brooks, D
District 8, MICKELL LOWERY, D
District 9, EDMUND FORD JR., D
District 10, Britney Thornton, D
District 11, Miska Clay Bibbs, D
District 12, Erika Sugarmon, D
District 13, MICHAEL WHALEY, D
This, folks, is change. And city government is on the flipper, too. There were two items on the ballot for city voters only. One was a race for City Court judge. The incumbent, former county equity officer Carolyn Watkins, was turned out by Kenya Hooks, the city’s chief prosecutor.
More important for what it augurs was the overwhelming defeat by Memphis voters of proposed Memphis Ordinance 5823 by a convincing margin of 52,582 to 26,759.
That referendum victory for a two-term limit means not just that neither Mayor Jim Strickland nor any City Council member who is now in a second term can run again in city government. It also mandates that the controls will pass to new faces and, mayhap, to new ideas. For some time the names of retiring county Commissioner Van Turner, Downtown Memphis Commissioner Paul Young, and state House Minority Leader Karen Camper have been circulated as possible mayoral aspirants. More names and more energies are almost sure to come.
Former GOP candidate turned poll-watcher Patti Possel
There were anomalies elsewhere in the election, notably in the ranks of the judiciary. But first, props are called for in the case of longtime Republican activist Charlotte Bergman, an African American who has toiled in party ranks for more than a generation and became in the process a perennial primary candidate for the 9th Congressional District seat held, more or less in perpetuity, by Democrat Steve Cohen. There was a tendency for outsiders to see her activities as feckless, but she has just, and in the Republican primary, decisively turned away a moneyed entrepreneur named Brown Dudley, who supposedly had the wherewithal to give Cohen a run for his money in November. Clearly, GOP voters consider Bergman a legitimate voice for grievances and aspirations.
More kudos. Carol Chumney, the onetime state legislator and City Council member who made two races for Memphis mayor and then, to most eyes, had slipped away. Actually, she started taking care of her law practice and went to work on an interesting memoir, published just months ago. Now, after a spell of useful activism on the voting reforms front, she has won the election as Circuit Court judge in Division II. A good year, indeed.
And a tip of the hat to Joe Townsend, who came out of nowhere to beat veteran Judge Karen D. Webster in Probate Court, Division II, by 66,186 to 47,660.
There were, to be sure, unforeseen turns in the judges’ ballot as well. Most drastically, Mark Ward, Criminal Court judge in Division IX and the author of the primer on criminal law which is basic reading for all Criminal Court judges, went down to newcomer Melissa Boyd.
Joe Ozment, who had every known endorsement from various groups, including the Bar Association itself, lost in a multi-candidate race to Jennifer Fitzgerald for the Criminal Court, Division II, post.
Gerald Skahan, junior member of a brother-sister judicial team, lost his seat on the bench in General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 9, to Sheila Bruce-Renfroe, who won a judgeship on her second try. Meanwhile, Skahan’s sister, Paula Skahan, was run unexpectedly close by Michael Floyd in Criminal Court, Division I.
And Christian Johnson, a bankruptcy lawyer with a penchant for wearing cowboy hats, upset Judge Loyce Lambert-Ryan in General Sessions Criminal Court, Division 15.
There were other surprises and close calls, enough to suggest that, to an unusual degree, change was the order of the day.
Judicial races aside, most of that change, to repeat, was at the expense of the Republican Party in overtly partisan matchups, and it is hard, given demographic realities, to see how that trend will be reversed.
Increasingly, the politics of Shelby County will be antithetical to those of Tennessee state government. JB Smiley of the Memphis City Council made a brave, and perhaps premature, run at the Democratic nomination for governor. He won in Shelby County but lost statewide to Dr. Jason Martin of Nashville, another area which, like Memphis, has grievances against the state.
Gubernatorial hopeful Jason Martin of Nashville
Perhaps, Martin can do better than expected against Republican Governor Bill Lee. Even if not, the bench of potential gubernatorial hopefuls, many of them from Memphis and many mentioned in this article, is almost certain to expand. And the change that got started in this year’s Shelby County election is just on its first legs.
When you’re scanning the sky for incoming artillery, you don’t always notice the termites chewing away at the beams in your basement.
That’s another way of saying, when you’re obsessed with the latest episodes of King Don Un’s reality show up in D.C., you sometimes forget to pay attention to what’s happening in your old home town. Specifically, what’s going on with the Memphis City Council and with certain members who are running for other offices to be decided in the upcoming August 2nd election.
I’m generally in favor of term limits, as are most local voters, judging from the fact that they’ve voted in two-term limits for most county offices and for the Shelby County Commission and, in 2008, voted by a three-to-one margin to limit the Memphis City Council to two terms. In that same election, Memphians voted by a similar margin to institute Instant Runoff Voting, which allows voters to rank their choices and by so doing, eliminate expensive runoff elections.
One perhaps unforseen result of term limits has been the ongoing recycling of various office-holders from one county job to another. Term-limited out of the county clerk’s office? Just run for county assessor or Juvenile Court clerk or trustee or register of deeds. Anyone can register a deed, right? The roles change, but the cast of characters remains the same. It’s a hassle to have to find a new public office to run for every eight years. Such a drag.
This year, three city council members — Edmund Ford, Bill Morrison, and Janis Fullilove — are candidates for the county commission, Probate Court clerk, and Juvenile Court clerk, respectively. If any or all of the three wins their prospective new offices, a pivotal question arises: How long will they will hold on to their council seats before resigning them? By law, they can wait 90 days. If they do, it complicates an already complicated matter.
Memphis City Ordinance #1852 reads, “on any vacancy occurring in the Council … a successor shall be elected to fill out the remainder of the term. … That special municipal election shall be held on the date of the next August or November election.” If any these council members are elected to another office on August 2nd and hold onto their council seat for 90 days, a November election for those seats becomes nearly impossible.
Further muddying the water is the fact that city council Chairman Berlin Boyd and council Attorney Allan Wade have cited an as-yet-unseen (and perhaps nonexistent?) legal memo that states that the next council election can’t be held until next August. If that decision prevails, then any vacant council seats would be filled via appointment by the current council, thereby depriving those represented by said councilmembers the right to decide who represents them.
The sad fact is, this city council seems quite willing to ignore the will of Memphis voters. In January, council members voted to put a referendum on the November ballot to allow voters to give them three terms instead of two. They have also managed to avoid implementing the Instant Runoff System approved by city voters in 2008 and have put a couple of confusing IRV referendums on the November ballot to thwart or reverse that decision.
Bottom line, if the council gets its way: Citizens in the three possibly affected districts won’t get to vote on who represents them for more than a year. But, as a consolation prize, this November, we will all get a chance to give them three terms instead of two. Tough call.
Frankly, I think it’s time we go to the basement and check the beams. Something’s chewing away down there.
Editor’s note:The house pictured on last week’s cover was not the house being objected to by the Cooper-Young couple quoted in the cover story. Thanks to gracious home-owner Monica Braun, who pointed out the possibly misleading image.
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.
