News
By Matt Pulle
Michael McDonald could have ended on a graceful note after he was fired as the Davidson County election administrator. He chose differently.
"The real travesty is not in my termination. The real travesty is that on November 2004, there will be chaos," he said.
What's troubling is that McDonald might be right. While McDonald lost his job, Kathy Charlton Deshotels, one of the highest-ranking employees at the commission, kept hers, even though Democrats and Republicans alike blame the 14-year veteran for a series of recent mishaps ranging from missed federal deadlines to questions about the accuracy of the office's voter rolls. Her lawyers portray Deshotels as a soft-spoken, diminutive victim of a punitive working environment at the commission. Still, Deshotels is one of many Democrats, from state Rep. Sherry Jones to commissioner Eddie Bryan to McDonald himself, who seem to have their fingerprints on every commission fracas. Thanks to local Democrats, who dominate the office from top to bottom, the commission has become the most dysfunctional board in Metro.
The commission aired its dirty laundry last Thursday morning in a stuffed second-floor conference room inundated with reporters, journalism students, camera crews and bemused spectators. That's when a bickering election commission fired McDonald, who planned to resign, then changed his mind. It was a wild, contentious meeting that made for good theater and bad government all at once. There were allegations of racism, hints of secret meetings, grandstanding speeches and a threat of a federal lawsuit from McDonald's charismatic attorney Larry Woods, who later implied that the commissioners plotted the ouster of his client behind closed doors.
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"It was a travesty, it was an outrage and it was conducted behind people's back," Woods huffed to a crowd of reporters about how the commissioners treated McDonald. "They have put so much pressure on him behind closed doors, you would not believe."
The vote on McDonald, like many others with this commission, split along party lines. The three Democrats voted to can him, while two Republicans voted to keep him on. The commissioners had given McDonald an unsatisfactory job evaluation in March. But the Republicans felt that terminating him camouflaged the real problems at the commission.
"If anyone believes that the problems of the election commission would end with the firing of McDonald, they are kidding themselves," Republican commissioner Lynn Greer noted during the meeting.
"Mr. McDonald is a person of integrity," said commission chair and Democrat Betty Nixon, who came to the meeting not to praise but to bury McDonald. "He is an educated person. He is an articulate person. But the confidence in the work of the commission is spinning out of control."
Both McDonald and the Republican commissioners fingered Deshotels for the commission's missteps. She was fired last December, only to be reinstated after filing a lawsuit. Although she was never named, everyone at the meeting knew it was Deshotels commission members were referring to when they talked of a mysterious employee who was undermining the commission's work. "The travesty is that the problems go back to one employee," McDonald said at last week's meeting, during which he used the word "travesty" at least four times.
"There is a very divisive force that poisons the commission," Greer added, again referring to Deshotels.
Their point was simple: How could McDonald be held accountable for the failings of an employee whom he tried to fire but Metro brought back? Actually, when the Metro Legal Department recommended settling Deshotels' lawsuit and restoring her position, McDonald sent an e-mail supporting the decision. He also gave her positive job evaluations until this year, when he gave her low marks.
This week, he told the Scene that Deshotels' firing should have sticked, that he only supported her reinstatement because he had no choice.
So all of this is a bit murky, even the reason for McDonald's back-and-forth on Deshotels. McDonald never offered a compelling enough case for firing her, and that's one reason why Metro settled her lawsuit. But that doesn't mean that Deshotels is a model employee. Call it a series of coincidences, but Deshotels shadows the two most recent controversies involving the commission, plus an ugly dispute last year that culminated in McDonald filing a police report against a commissioner.
Last Tuesday, election commission staff worked well past midnight mailing 300 absentee ballots to military personnel and civilians. They were scrambling because, with Deshotels apparently in charge of this task, they missed the deadline by a week. Deshotels blamed the delay on problems at the printer and the way the ballots were folded. But her colleagues and some of the commissioners blamed her for failing to get them to the printer on time.
Betty Nixon, the patient but overwhelmed commission chair and a longtime Democrat, says that the absentee ballot mishap was ultimately McDonald's responsibility, not Deshotels'. "Michael [McDonald] said that Kathy [Deshotels] ordered the ballots and she didn't get it done. My thought with him was that if you know it's not getting done, you need to help her."
McDonald also blamed Deshotels for problems with the office's voter verification program, which is also her responsibility. Greer released a report earlier this month showing, among other things, that 37,000 voters who should have been labeled as inactive weren't. There is some dispute about his findings, but everyone agrees that it's troubling for the county's voter databases to be so woefully out-of-date.
Deshotels' lawyers have claimed that the Republicans and McDonald have conspired to use their client as a scapegoat for the office's problems—and there's probably some truth to that. But Deshotels' detractors are numerous. After Deshotels sued Metro for wrongful termination, Harriet Hill, a 40-year veteran and the second-ranking employee at the election commission, gave her deposition. She said that she recommended Deshotels be fired last year for "causing disturbances among other employees" and spreading "untruths." She said Deshotels' work was sloppy and noted that "anytime any problem comes up, Miss Deshotels has been in the middle of the situation." Lionel Barrett, a former defense attorney who's not exactly a familiar face in Republican circles, has also criticized Deshotels for taking personal leave in the middle of a tough time for the commission.
It was Deshotels and commission member Eddie Bryan who plunged the body in another sordid affair last year. That's when Bryan had Deshotels secretly snatch the computer files of Sharon Wood, an employee in charge of recruiting Republican poll workers for local elections. Bryan told Deshotels that he believed Wood was using her office for inappropriate partisan activities, and asked Deshotels to target any documents or databases that might corroborate his hunch.
Still, when Bryan talks, Deshotels evidently listens. The two are social friends. So, at Bryan's request, Deshotels retrieved a few overtly partisan documents and showed them to Wood's immediate supervisors. They were disgusted at what Deshotels had done, which, though perfectly legal, was viewed as bad form. Attorneys George Barrett and Ted Carey, who represent Deshotels, say that their client has been punished for retrieving the computer files even though a federal judge later ruled that she was well within her rights.
Sharon Wood, however, was vindicated. Her job is to congregate in GOP circles and recruit Republicans to staff the polls, a tough job in Davidson County. As her supervisors noted, it made sense for her to have partisan documents on her computer.
But Bryan, an old-school Democrat and secretary-treasurer of the Tennessee AFL-CIO Labor Council, felt that Wood's activities were somehow inappropriate.
And that's when things got really weird.
McDonald says that Bryan demanded he fire Wood, threatening the election administrator in the process. McDonald then filed a police report, although he declined to press charges.
The last of the Democratic stooges is Democratic state Rep. Sherry Jones, the former chair of Davidson County's legislative delegation. Last year, the delegation selected five new election commissioners, with the charge of cleaning up the notoriously bumbling department, once and for all. (And to do this job, they picked not one, but two, employees of the AFL-CIO—Bryan and A.J. Starling.) In any case, shortly after the delegation made its selections, Jones began lobbying for McDonald's job, even though it wasn't open.
"Sherry Jones has been talking about this for a year," says fellow Democrat Betty Nixon. "This is just one of those things she wants to do. She's been open about it. My response to her is that we're going to have an open search and we're going to find the best person. I told her she was welcome to apply."
Recently, before McDonald was fired, Jones tried to make inroads with local Republicans too, including Jon Crisp, the chairman of the Davidson County Republican Party. "She came over and said, 'Can I have a minute of your time?' " Crisp recalls. "She said, 'I'm interested in this job, and I'd like to see if you will support us.' "
Jones also contacted Lynn Greer, the Republican and commission member. "At the time she talked to me, I told her there was no vacancy; Michael hadn't resigned, nor had he been fired," Greer recalls. "After that, she said, 'Well, I just want to get to know you,' and I said, 'Well, I don't think this is the appropriate time.' "
The Tennessee Blue Book lists Jones as having worked as a meeting planner/consultant. That's not exactly a logical stepping stone for becoming an administrator of elections. In contrast, another candidate for the post, Patricia Heim, is a former Republican commissioner and a certified public accountant. Of course, Betty Nixon already told The Tennessean that the next administrator will probably be a Democrat.
Precisely why that's the case is unclear. After all, their record of accomplishment at the Davidson County Election Commission may not be long. But this much can be said of them: Their bench is.