Tennessee Senate Democrats fought Republican legislation Tuesday that will delay secure elections and burden local governments.

Senate Republicans voted lockstep to pass legislation delaying the implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act until the 2012 elections. Under prior law, more secure voting machines and ballot procedures were to be used in the 2010 elections.

Tennessee currently uses the most insecure voting machines available, as determined by a New York University study.

“Citizens should know that when they go to vote, their vote is going to count,” said Sen. Roy Herron, D-Dresden. “There have been too many cases of fraud and computer problems with our current system.

“Today, we took a huge step backward.”

Herron introduced an amendment to the bill that would have helped counties purchase secure voting machines. The costs would have been covered by federal funds already set aside for improving ballot security and voter confidence under the Help America Vote Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.

The amendment to help local taxpayers and voters was tabled 18-12 by Senate Republicans on a party-line vote.

“We tried to protect the taxpayer by taking the burden off counties, but Republicans voted it down,” said Sen. Eric Stewart, D-Belvidere.

The requirements will now go into effect for the 2012 elections, when, as the law is currently written, county governments will have to foot any costs not covered by the designated federal funds.

In the interview we learn about the Fightin’ 27th, the job of the Senate Democratic Caucus and its chair, regional megasites, voter suppression, being torn between several gubernatorial candidates, and that Democrats are really the party of the big tent. Plus, Senator Finney clears up the confusion about the existence of rural Democrats and finishes this sentence, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but…” [24.66MB Download MP3]

Senator Finney: But as I was sitting there watching them [Kim McMillian, Ward Cammack, Mike McWherter, and Roy Herron] I thought, they all bring a unique perspective to the race – a different set of tools, if you will, on how to fix the State’s issues, the State’s problems. I’m really excited. I think the next year is going to be really tremendous in Democratic politics. We need that in Tennessee. As you mentioned the trending and just what the turnout has been, you look at some of the districts in the last race where we had really good Democratic candidates running for the House and for the Senate and unfortunately they’re not serving with us now because of the turnout. They were running in districts where Barack Obama was beat by 15, 18,000 votes. That tells you that we’ve got a message to communicate – we’ve got to get it out there – and generate some excitement and some enthusiasm about what we want to do to help our state. And I think we have a tremendous slate of candidates to help us do that.

Download audio file (liberadio20090511lowefinney.mp3)