The Memphis Flyer gets it. When the judge “declined last week to issue the injunction sought by plaintiffs trying to force the hand of stonewalling state election authorities,” he potentially signed a death warrant for the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act – and secure and accurate elections for Tennesseans.
Without such an injunction, it seems clear that Secretary of State Tre Hargett and state Election Coordinator Mark Goins will attempt to run the clock out until January when the legislature convenes again. And the Republican majorities in both houses, fully alert now to how the game is being played, will pick up where they left off in the 2009 legislative session. That was when, on the eve of the General Assembly’s adjournment, they tried to vote a postponement of the act’s provisions until after the 2010 election cycle but narrowly failed to do so, essentially because a handful of key GOP members happened to be elsewhere on the day of the vote.
That oversight will be corrected in January, when party discipline will rule the day. The reality is that Democrats want the TVCA in effect for the 2010 election cycle and the Republicans don’t. The GOP will have the votes, and all that remains to be seen is whether the act is merely postponed or amended or quashed altogether.
Tennesseans deserve to secure and accurate elections – the kind that we can’t get now because the voting machines we use simply do not work.
The TVCA will replace the broken system we have now – where a machine votes for us under cover of a secret black box – with one in which we have a piece of paper that actually records the intent of each voter correctly – and which we can rely on for recounts and audits.
Why are they still dragging their feet?
This is Goins’ and Hargett’s doing. They will drag implementation out until January when they will no longer have to do so.
When is the judge in question up for a retention vote?