The Nine Ways Democracy in Tennessee is Attacked
There was an article in The Atlantic in July called Is Tennessee A Democracy? in which the Anne Applebaum cited some compelling anecdotes about voter suppression, shady backroom deals, and the expulsion of two members of the Tennessee Three, Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis, to paint a portrait of an increasingly-authoritarian state.
The article was short on specifics, however, and I thought it would be worthwhile to take some time to enumerate precisely the myriad ways the deck is stacked against democracy in the state I call home:
1. Gerrymandering
Over a hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce wrote a joke about Gerrymandering that went like this:
THE Committee on Gerrymander worked late, drawing intricate lines on a map of the State, and being weary sought repose in a game of poker. At the close of the game the six Republican members were bankrupt and the single Democrat had all the money. On the next day, when the Committee was called to order for business, one of the luckless six mounted his legs, and said:
"Mr. Chairman, before we bend to our noble task of purifying politics, in the interest of good government I wish to say a word of the untoward events of last evening. If my memory serves me the disasters which overtook the Majority of this honourable body always befell when it was the Minority's deal. It is my solemn conviction, Mr. Chairman, and to its affirmation I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honour, that that wicked and unscrupulous Minority redistricted the cards!"
The joke has a lot of layers, which I won’t ruin by enumerating (I’m already doing enough enumerating here) but suffice it to say gerrymandering was already an old concept when Bierce wrote about it. The fact that folks have been doing it a long time, and fact that the Supreme Court made it legal when they struck down the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, doesn’t mean it’s democratic.
2022 marked the first election held in Tennessee under the first new maps gerrymandered in the wake of destruction of the Voting Rights Act, and the first one where they didn’t have to carve out a district with a weird amoeba pseudopod that went to Marsha Blackburn’s house to ensure her a seat in congress, so the legislature took advantage of this to carve up the strongly Democratic 5th District in order to eliminate that seat, and change the makeup of the Tennessee congressional delegation from 78% Republican to 89% Republican. In a state where the population is 60% Republican at best1.
2. Voter ID laws
Every time I mention that voter ID laws are undemocratic, someone pipes up and calls me a racist, because “you’re saying black people aren’t smart enough to navigate the voter ID system.” Which might be relevant if I’d called voter ID laws racist (which they are, but that’s secondary here).
There are two equally effective means of voter fraud: One is having people vote who, because they aren’t citizens, because they don’t exist, or because they’ve already voted, should not be permitted to vote. The other is preventing people who should be permitted to vote from exercising their constitutional rights. Voter ID laws claim to prevent the first means of voter fraud, while engaging directly in the second means.
3. Separate day-of voting rules based on whether you live in a red county or a blue county
I haven’t voted the day of the election in Davidson County since I moved to Nashville in 2010, because on election day I’ve got to get to a polling location close to home, but far away from where I work. If I vote early, I can vote at any of a dozen locations in the county—sometimes, anyway (see item 5, below).
In red Rutherford County, just southeast of Nashville, you can vote at any location on election day, because the state has a vested interest in making sure it’s easier to vote if you’re Republican. This inconsistency means that in a statewide race or a race where districts span over more than one county, there will be more per-capita votes in the red counties than in the blue county, because they’ve made it harder for the blue county to vote.
4. No legally-mandated paper trail for votes
In How To Take Over The World, Ryan North notes that it Tennessee is one of seven states that didn’t have a legally mandated paper trail during 2020 elections, so there was no means for having a recount, and all seven of them went for Trump. Davidson County machines generate a paper trail, providing a check against malfeasance, but in neighboring Sumner County (reviewed at length in The Atlantic article at the top) they won’t switch to paper trail machines until the 2024 election. Without a paper trail or a way to recount votes, there’s no assurance that any of the elections in Tennessee in the past thirty years haven’t been compromised by any number of interested parties—although it is interesting that the results of a number of elections haven’t matched polling.
Strangely, in spite of this obvious flaw in the election process, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation ranked Tennessee #1 in the country for “election integrity.”
5. Restrictions on early voting locations in blue counties
In the 2022 election, Davidson county did not open all its early voting locations for the duration of early voting, while surrounding counties had a full complement of early voting locations open. The reason given for this by the Republican-controlled county election board was that the gubernatorial and congressional elections were “not important.” However, in 2023, for a mayoral and city council election, 100% of early voting locations were open—because there is no competition with surrounding red counties, so no reason for the county election board to put its thumb on the scales in favor of more-Republican areas.
6. Laws making giving an absentee ballot to somebody a crime
After the Tennessee Black Voter Project collected 91,000 new voter applications in 2018, the state legislature passed a law that made it registering voters without registering with the state a crime. That law was struck down as unconstitutional, but there are still laws on the books that make giving someone an absentee ballot a felony, and helping someone get an absentee ballot themselves a misdemeanor. All designed to make it harder for voters to register, and to have their vote count.
7. Having to verbally declare party allegiance during primary elections
Tennessee has a closed-primary system, which in and of itself isn’t an impediment to democracy,2 but the mechanism by which it’s implemented often intimidates voters in the electoral minority. When you walk up to the registration desk during a primary, you’re required to verbally “declare allegiance3” to either the Democratic or Republican party in order to be allowed to receive your ballot.
More than once I’ve heard stories of election workers expressing disapproval of a voter in a deep-red county requesting a ballot for a Democratic primary. Moreover, voting in a given primary becomes a public record (there are any number of apps which allow a person to see how people in their contact list voted,) which, coupled with at-will employment, can mean voting in the “wrong” primary can cost you your job. Additionally, in some of these counties, the only contested races are in Republican primaries, which leads some voters to request a Republican ballot in order to move “the lesser of two evils” forward into the general election, which has the added effect of getting only Republican campaign mailers for the rest of eternity, and potentially committing a felony, depending on how the law is interpreted.
8. Prohibiting out of state poll watchers or election observers from auditing the process.
This should go without saying, but apparently I’ve got to say it anyway. If you’re not doing something shady with your elections, you should have zero issues with folks observing your process. It’s telling that the Heritage Foundation lists this as one of the reasons for Tennessee’s “election integrity.”
9. A felony disenfranchisement law that prevents over 20% of black people from voting
According to The Sentencing Project4, over 350,000 people who have completed their sentence for committing a crime have lifetime disenfranchisement in Tennessee. 9% of otherwise eligible voters, and 21% of eligible black voters, are prevented from voting for life. This based on a law passed in Tennessee (as in much of the south) as a reaction to the passage of the 15th Amendment, allowing formerly freed slaves the right to vote. Conviction of a felony—things that are felonies in Tennessee include being homeless, voting in the wrong primary (see item 7 above), and obstructing traffic during a protest—will take away a person’s right to vote in perpetuity, with nothing short of a pardon from the governor5 restoring them.
All of these combine to make it easier for the entrenched power in the Tennessee Legislature and the Governor’s mansion to subvert the will of the people, and consistently work to maintain their stranglehold on power. And fixing this will require a vast, concerted effort by Congress, activists, and voters to get anything resembling normal democracy restored to the state.
In two-way contests in presidential elections Republicans win something between 56-61% of the vote, but those numbers are skewed by the other eight items on the list—especially item nine.
Opinions differ on this, to say the least.
The law states “At the time the voter seeks to vote, the voter declares allegiance to the political party in whose primary the voter seeks to vote and states that the voter intends to affiliate with that party.”
Any guesses as to whether the governor restores voting rights in a partisan manner?