Monday, January 11, 2010
Legislature / Politics / Woods Election Reform Activists Go on High Alert Against Senate Attack
Posted by Jeff Woods on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 7:15 AM
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Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey is making good on his pledge to give his top priority to delaying the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act. Ramsey has placed it on Tuesday's Senate agenda, one of only five bills up for votes before the start of the special session on education reform.
Election reform activists have been spurred into action and hope to mobilize in time to stop Ramsey and the Republican-run Senate. "This means we have only one day to flood the Capitol with calls," Liberadio(!) cohost Mary Mancini tells supporters in an email alert.
Another activist, Bernie Ellis, sent an email to one of Ramsey's rivals in the governor's race, Bill Gibbons. Ellis urges Gibbons to speak out and suggests Ramsey wants to delay paper ballots so he can cheat Gibbons out of votes in this year's Republican primary. (That's a ridiculous assertion, of course, but hey, we're just telling you what Ellis is saying.) Only last week, Ellis points out, Gibbons was beating his chest over the need for good-government reforms:
However, unless our votes are counted as they are cast (in primaries and general elections), your principled positions are simply sound and fury and will insure your defeat in the primary, despite the desires of TN Republicans to bring the party back into the more moderate, middle of the road position that is more reflective of Tennessee Republicans in the past. I do hope you have some chance at being treated fairly in the primary in the absence of the TN Voter Confidence Act. However, I would not bet money (or a cup of coffee) on it. Tilting at windmills makes great literature, but pointless politics.Here's some background on this issue. It's never been clear why Republicans are so bent on delaying this law. It would eliminate the hazards of paperless, unverified electronic voting. In Tennessee, 93 of 95 counties use touch-screen machines with no paper trail to verify results. The Voter Confidence Act calls for replacing these by the 2010 elections with paper ballots to be marked by voters and then read by optical scanners--a system allowing for recounts and audits of the actual tallies. Some county election commissioners are against making the change because they'd have to buy paper ballots. In any event, the do-gooders aren't likely to succeed. Legislation delaying the law cleared the House but narrowly failed in the Senate last year. Two Republicans were absent that day in the Senate or it would have passed then.
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