The Tennessee Election Commission
Joe Lance takes a very detailed look at the Tennessee Election Commission.
Recently, a woman here who had been administrator of elections for a long while was replaced because she was a democrat. She’d been in office since the early 80s.
When we talked to the head of the local GOP party, he said simply, “It’s our time.”
Lance expands on this discussion.
Here’s a question: Why are election commissions defined in partisan terms anyway? I get that it matters when one or the other party controls the actual legislative bodies, and, to a slightly lesser degree, the administration; and I understand that there’s a good chance that anyone interested in being a commissioner would likely have a personal party preference; but to spell out “there shall be one more of thesethan of those if these are in power in the House” and so forth seems wholly unnecessary in terms of selecting good, honest men and women to fill the role.
And here’s the answer: The Tennessee Democratic Party, which did control the Legislature for generations, sought to extend its grip on power even further, and brought this partisan rule into existence. This occurred decades ago (citation needed, as the ‘pedia says), but, as surely all but the most optimistic realized, the tables would eventually turn; and now they have.
The Republicans, for their part, are seeming just a little too eager to grab the electoral reins. Maybe they are hedging their bets against a possible loss in the 2010 elections. In that case, waiting until 2011 would do them no good. Maybe they’re just tired of waiting.
It’s all a little disturbing, though. Do them no good? What “good”? Why should either (no, make that any) political party expect an advantage to come out of the election commission?
In many ways, it’s a game of chess. On the other hand, Lance questions the functionality of the election commission in his excellent post.
Why should either party get to be the bully on the block?
And here is a breakdown of the Tennessee Attorney General Ruling on the issue.
The Tennessee attorney general issued an opinion last week that said “a court could find that the dismissal of a county administrator of elections solely on the basis of political party affiliation constitutes a violation of that individual’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights under the United States Constitution.”
The AG’s opinion went on to say, however, if a county election commission can show it has delegated “broad discretionary policy making authority” to the administrator of elections, a court could find that political affiliation is “an appropriate requirement for the effective performance of that particular administrator’s position.”
I smell lawsuits for both sides of the aisle in the wind with that open-ended ruling from the AG.
Why should either (no, make that any) political party expect an advantage to come out of the election commission
Hello? Just fall off the turnip truck, did we? Can you spell rigged elections, boys and girls? See, I remember the rumors of Jake Butcher paying for votes and stuffing ballot boxes. I’ve talked about patronage jobs with local county judges who think those jobs are what life’s all about.
But the bottom line is that if your party can head major portions of the infrastructure, you can maneuver yourself into a place where you are granting favors to people who will remember them and vote with those remembrances. It’s applying old style politics to a new, more transparent, world because you’re too frigging stupid to realize how little it will matter any more.
Besides, if’n them voting machines don’t make paper trails, you can do all sorts of stuff and nobody can prove it. (Mind you, they probably have no clue how, but they may find people who do.)
Yup.
My head got banged in the great Turnip truck accident of Aught Eight.
I remember the Jack Butcher rumors too. (The gray on my head is blinding these days.)
To add, I don’t think that the locals are getting many favors these days. And I don’t think they realize that.
Oh, yeah, gerrymandering is the ultimate goal of this sort of stuff. It’s always been that way. It’s just that the subtleties of backscratching between pols and parties have been tossed into the ditch in recent years in favor of blatant power grabs, because hey, it’s worked all the way up to Pennsylvania Avenue, so why not locally? And in some places in Tennessee, it’s not even between parties — it’s WITHIN parties. I was talking with an election commissioner who is a staunch Republican who got bounced out this spring — by Republicans. (She’s more of a Rockefeller Republican than Radical Right; we communicate quite openly and pleasantly.) She’d run the office without any trouble or complaint, just like her Democratic predecessor (who retired), but they bounced her for some fellow who may not be qualified and now there are lawyers involved. She and the longtime predecessor never did their ‘lectioneering in public but instead just encouraged folks to vote. She said she apparently “didn’t encourage folks hard enough to vote McCain.” (She has a good attitude about the stink.)
Y’all don’t want to get me started on patronage jobs. I could give you an alphabetical list by department in my home county right now. Gaaah.