Tag Archives: davidson

Six people voted twice in Davidson County primary; election worker fired

An election worker has been dismissed after six people voted twice in Davidson County last week and an election commissioner says she could refuse to approve the results unless questions are answered about reports of wider irregularities, according to The Tennessean.

Staffers blame a clerical error for letting half a dozen people vote twice, once during early voting and again on Election Day. But Commissioner Tricia Herzfeld says that mistake — and potentially others — are serious enough that she may not agree to certify the results at the commission’s next meeting on May 19.

In a letter to election administrator Kent Wall sent Monday, Herzfeld also criticized fellow commissioners and staff for not talking about potential irregularities, including the possibility that some people were not allowed to vote.

“The public has a right to be informed of these discoveries and the candidates, in particular, deserve to know if anything that occurred on Election Day could impact their races,” Herzfeld wrote.

Officials have verified one irregularity: that electronic poll books were not updated by an outside vendor, Omaha-based Election Systems & Software LLC, to show that thousands of Davidson County voters had cast ballots during the early voting period. Election workers learned of the mistake on Election Day and informed state officials late that night.

Mark Goins, the state’s election administrator, said he has recommended referring the six voters to Davidson County prosecutors.
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See also the Nashville Scene, which includes the text of Herzfeld’s letter, and comments from Wall:
Wall downplayed the significance of the snafu, pointing to procedures on the back-end of the election that meant officials knew about the issue the next day.

“The procedures were in place that this should not have happened on the front end, but because of human error, their side and ours, it did,” he says. “But we caught it.”

However, had the amount of double-votes been in the thousands — as they could have been — knowing about it after the fact would not have prevented the integrity of the entire election from being in question.

This is not the first time that Election Systems & Software (ES&S) has been at the center of voting problems in Nashville. In 2012, some voters intending to vote in Democratic primaries were given Republican ballots in error. ES&S machines have also been related to problems in Memphis, and other states as well. But Wall says it doesn’t cause him to question whether to continue contracting with the company.

“Any time you have a human action taken, there’s always a potential in anything you’re doing that something could go wrong here,” Wall says. “But ES&S has been supplying equipment and software around the United States for a long, long time, and they’re a big supplier of equipment in the state of Tennessee and they’re approved by the state of Tennessee to continue to use ES&S.”

Asked why he and other election officials apparently intended not to make the election-day issue public, Wall suggested their wasn’t much to share.

“There’s no story,” he says. “We know what happened, we know how it happened, we know the magnitude of it. I don’t know what we would’ve done differently in that circumstance.”

State Election Commission Signs Off on Firing Davidson County Administrator

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Four days after the Davidson County Election Commission fired its top administrator, the State Election Commission accepted the final version of the blistering review that led to his termination, reports The Tennessean.
The panel approved State Elections Coordinator Mark Goins’ report with little discussion Monday afternoon. Chairman Kent Younce said he didn’t see “any useful purpose” in dissecting the report after the Davidson County Election Commission voted 4-1 Thursday to fire Election Administrator Albert Tieche.
Goins made a few changes to his draft of the report but still found “an unacceptable pattern of serious errors” throughout the 2012 election cycle, which “led to an erosion of confidence” in Davidson County’s election operations.
The review found problems with legal notices, sample ballots, voting technology, staffing at polling places and other practices. It criticized Tieche for failing to open early voting for the presidential preference primary on a Saturday, a mistake the State Election Commission reprimanded him for a year ago.
Goins noted that the Davidson County Election Commission “has acknowledged ‘various irregularities or mistakes’ in its response to this review.”

Davidson Election Administrator Fired; Commissioner Quits

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Albert Tieche is out at the Davidson County Election Commission, and Commissioner Jim Gotto announced he will be leaving as well, reports The City Paper.
After a heated meeting where tempers where high and accusations flew, the commission voted 4 to 1 to fire Tieche from his post as administrator of elections. The decision follows a highly critical report from the state, detailing numerous problems with the execution of elections over the last year.
Before the vote, Gotto — a newly appointed Republican commissioner — accused Chairman Ron Buchanan of “fast-tracking” the process, and harboring a “deep personal bias” against Tieche. Gotto will remain on the commission through July 31, or until state Republicans can find a replacement.
“You’ve lost my respect and my trust,” Gotto told Buchanan, to loud applause from a room full of Republican activists who shared his displeasure with the chairman.
Both Tieche and Gotto left the meeting without comment.
Tieche appeared to be in trouble from the minute the meeting was called to order. As the crowded hearing room of reporters, activists, and a couple of Metro Council members looked on, a clearly agitated Buchanan began a lengthy statement by addressing the stream of mean emails he had received in recent weeks, some of which he said may have even crossed the line into being criminally threatening.
He also denied the rumors in those emails that he had been appointed with a directive to fire Tieche. In fact, he said, the only directive he and the other new commissioners received, aside from carrying out the duties of the commission, was to stay out of the headlines. Buchanan acknowledged that they had “failed miserably” at that goal.
The chairman went on to summarize a number of problems cited in state Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins’ review of the commission, including failure to open on a Saturday during early voting, understaffed and under-resourced polling places, inadequately trained poll workers, and issuing conflicting reports regarding voter participation to the state. Along the way, Buchanan rejected just about every defense Tieche had offered for the failings.

Election Administrator Disputes ‘Scathing’ State Review

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Davidson County Election Administrator Albert Tieche survived to work another day after enduring sometimes testy questioning by his bosses, who took a scathing state review to heart but decided not to discipline him after a nearly five-hour meeting on Friday, according to The Tennessean.
Tieche still could face a tough road if state Elections Coordinator Mark Goins, the author of the draft review, moves to decertify him once Goins presents his final report to state election commissioners next month. Through a spokesman, Goins declined to comment Friday night.
The five Davidson County election commissioners decided to respond to Goins’ review in the way that Metro attorneys advised — by acknowledging about a dozen errors and issues and succinctly saying how they’d try to avoid repeating them. They did not adopt Tieche’s much longer, more personal and sometimes feisty response to Goins, though the administrator and his own attorney, Art McClellan, said they might still submit it to the state.
Ron Buchanan, the election commission’s chairman and one of four new members, said any decisions about Tieche’s future would come later. Buchanan and other election commissioners dodged questions about their confidence in Tieche’s ability to conduct fair elections.
“There’s going to have to be some mending of fences and changes of procedures to restore voter confidence,” said Buchanan, a Republican.
“We’re going to move forward,” said A.J. Starling, a Democrat.
In a document longer than the review that prompted it, Tieche contested virtually every charge made by Goins. He wrote that the review “focuses on fault and blame rather than fostering improvement.”
“A casual review of the draft report would cause one to conclude that it is written to be personal in nature.”
For example, where Goins said the election commission’s use of faulty technology in some precincts in the August primary was “shocking” and that it could have influenced the outcomes of two House races, Tieche took offense at the use of that term and said there were just 106 voter history errors out of more than 12,000 votes cast with the technology.
Tieche also said that he took “great exception” to Goins’ claim that disciplinary actions against employees who talked to state investigators in late January had been backdated to December so they wouldn’t appear retaliatory. “That is a direct attack on my character,” he said.

Nashville Election Administrator Responds to Probe, Hires Lawyer

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Davidson County Election Administrator Albert Tieche has hired an attorney to help him respond to a report on the commission’s management of last year’s elections.
Problems included failing to open the polls on a Saturday during early voting; machines that sometimes defaulted to the Republican ballot during the primary; and shortages of poll workers, printed forms, parking and phone lines on Election Day.
Tieche told The Tennessean (http://tnne.ws/11wT1xK) a draft of the state’s report frequently focuses on him. He declined to make it available, saying it’s not a public record until he and the commission have a chance to respond.
Tieche said he didn’t think the state had ever examined any county in that way.
All three Republican commissioners and one of two Democrats were replaced by state lawmakers recently after the commission considered a plan to investigate the citizenship status of all foreign-born voters.
The new commission met for the first time on Friday, and Tieche revealed that he had hired a lawyer at that meeting.
Some commissioners seemed to be caught off guard by that admission, since the Metro Law Department regularly advises the agency. The commission ultimately voted to require Tieche and his attorney to run their response by Metro attorneys before sending it to the state.
Metro Nashville conducted its own audit of the commission recently. The city found some problems but concluded that the agency has controls in place to ensure the integrity of elections.

Review Finds One ‘Potential Non-Citizen’ Voting in Davidson

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State Elections Coordinator Mark Goins’ office said Monday that a review of voter registration lists and the state Department of Safety and Homeland Security’s database found just 14 “potential non-citizens” on Davidson County’s voter rolls, reports The Tennessean.
Just one of those 14 people had ever voted, and that was sometime before 2012, said Blake Fontenay, a spokesman for the Tennessee Division of Elections.
The state’s finding contradicts the estimate put forth last month by Steve Abernathy, a Republican who will soon give up his seat on the Davidson County Election Commission. At the commission’s March 21 meeting, Abernathy said there could be 3,000 to 10,000 non-citizens in the county who managed to register to vote at the Department of Safety through the so-called motor voter law.
At the same meeting, Abernathy joined the four other commissioners in voting to rescind his own plan to review the citizenship status of foreign-born voters who registered to vote after March 1. Metro attorneys said the plan could violate both the motor voter law and the 14th Amendment by creating two classes of voters and subjecting one group to greater scrutiny.

Davidson’s GOP Legislators Ousting 3 County Election Commissioners

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Three Republicans who form the majority on the five-person Davidson County Election Commission are on their way out in a shakeup that ensures almost entirely new membership following a turbulent year, reports The Tennessean.
The State Election Commission is slated to take up appointments to the commission after Davidson County’s Republican state (legislative) delegation makes recommendations Monday.
According to multiple Nashville commissioners, the delegation — House Speaker Beth Harwell and Sens. Steve Dickerson and Ferrell Haile — plans to nominate a clean slate.
Commissioner Patricia Heim confirmed in an email late Thursday night that she was told she and the other two GOP members, Lynn Greer and Steve Abernathy, will not be back. Heim, who has served on the commission since 1995, said she didn’t know who would be appointed to replace them.
Greer, the commission’s chairman since Republicans took power in 2009, said he told Harwell that he “would prefer not to return” after a decade on the panel.
“Ten years is a long time to serve,” Greer said.
Abernathy — at the center of controversy lately for his proposal to review the citizenship status of recently registered foreign-born voters — said Harwell called him Thursday to say the GOP delegation planned to move in a different direction.
“I told her I appreciated the opportunity and that I felt we had made some positive improvements,” he said of his four years on the commission. “I didn’t ask her why, and she didn’t volunteer anything.”

Democrats Replace Eddie Bryan on Nashville Election Commission

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Davidson County’s Democratic lawmakers voted Monday to replace longtime election commissioner Eddie Bryan with attorney Tricia Herzfeld, less than a month after Bryan sided with Republicans to give foreign-born voters extra scrutiny, according to The Tennessean.
In a letter to the State Election Commission, state Rep. Brenda Gilmore, chairwoman of the county’s Democratic delegation, praised Herzfeld as “an exceptional lawyer in Davidson County who has worked tirelessly to preserve and protect the right to vote.”
….The change comes a week after The Tennessean reported that Bryan voted with two Republicans on the commission for a plan to review the citizenship status of recently registered voters who were born outside of the United States. Metro attorneys later said doing so would violate the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act — also known as the “motor voter law” — by creating two different classes of voters and scrutinizing one class more than the other.
The Metro Law Department urged the commission to rescind the vote when it meets next week.
Bryan, 80, said his vote for the citizenship review had “nothing at all” to do with the delegation’s decision, which he said was fine with him.
“I’m not upset about anything,” he said.

Harwell Defends State-level Charter School Authorizer

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House Speaker Beth Harwell has defended her push to let the state Board of Education – not the local school board – decide on authorizing a charter school in Davidson and Shelby counties. Jeff Woods lays out some of her comments in question and answer format.
An excerpt:
Q: The Democrats had a media avail this morning. Mike Turner is upset about your bill. He says you’re trying to resegregate schools in Nashville. What do you say to that?
Harwell: That is not my goal at all. If anything, the current charter schools that exist are located in our lower income areas. They are close to about 98 percent minority members. The ones that are doing well are doing exceptionally well. This would have actually made it possible for more diversity within our public charter school system, I believe. …
Q: How would the schools be more diverse? You mean more white?
Harwell: Yeah.
Q: Republicans say the best government is the one that’s closest to the people. This seems to fly in the face of that.
Harwell: No, I don’t think it does. We have a responsibility in this state to allow the most local person to have an option here, and the local person here is the parent. You can’t get much more local than that. I have a lot of parents, not only in my district but others, who wanted this option in our public school system. I am all about promoting and having the best public school system this city can have and right now we’re just simply not there.

State Charter ‘Authorizer’ Will Apply Only to Nashville, Memphis

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A bill allowing charter school applicants to apply directly to the state passed its first hurdle in Nashville Tuesday, potentially setting up a way for Memphis suburbs to have charter schools outside the control of the Unified Shelby County School Board, reports the Commercial Appeal.
The bill would allow charter school operators in Shelby and Davidson counties freedom to apply to the state to approve their charter applications instead of the local school board. The caveat is that if the state denied the application, there would be no appeal.
Under the current protocol, charter applicants that are denied by the school board may appeal the decision to the state Board of Education. The charter schools would report to the state Board of Education, and their test scores would be separate from the local school districts.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mark White, R-Germantown, passed 6-3 in the House Education subcommittee. The bill has no fiscal note; it now goes to the full House for further discussion.
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See also The Tennessean and Andrea Zelinski’s report, HERE.