Ed Wood "The Right Stuff" Published Aug. 14, 2002

The year of the write-in ballot

The year 2002 will long be remembered in Tennessee election circles as the year of the write-in ballot. Submitting a write-in choice is a privilege we have when we don't like any of the candidates being offered by the usual political parties. And this year there's been a lot of that.

In White County, the incumbent sheriff lost last May's Democrat primary by 381 votes. He staged a vigorous write-in campaign, and lost the second time by 2,648 votes. There's a lesson in there somewhere!

Then there was the matter of retiring state senator and income tax champion Bob Rochelle. Since his retirement didn't come in time for his name to be removed from the Democrat primary ballot, I fearlessly predicted that he would receive sufficient "courtesy" votes to overcome any write-in opposition, and would indeed run again in the November general election. Well, I missed that one! A virtually unknown write-in candidate, Sherry Fisher, vowing opposition to any increased taxation, blew him away!

But as I write this, the matter of a write-in candidacy in Davidson County is still unresolved. The write-in procedure varies a little from county to county, but basically requires the voter to write the name of the candidate and the office being sought on a special "write-in" ballot, and drop it into the ballot box. But in Davidson County, it seems that some 55 voters wrote in their selection of Republican candidate Karen Bennett for the position of "House of Representatives" instead of the more proper "Tennessee House District #52." Davidson County election officials then determined that those voters who specified "House of Representatives" were actually referring to a position in the United States Congress, rather than the Tennessee House of Representatives, leaving Bennett with insufficient votes to qualify in the state race against incumbent Democrat Rob Briley.

So now we again address the matter of voter intent. Did the 55 voters in question really intend to vote for Bennett as a United States congressperson? Or since Bennett was challenging the incumbent Tennessee state Representative, Rob Briley, shouldn't any dummy employed by the Davidson County Election Commission naturally understand that they were counting Bennett's votes as a candidate for the Tennessee House of Representatives, not for the Congress of the United States of America?

An unsigned editorial in the Nashville Tennessean states, "Obviously, election officials must go by what a voter writes on the ballot, not what they think the voter intended to write." Oh really? Wasn't the whole issue in the 2000 Florida presidential election an effort to show that more voters actually "intended" to vote for Gore than the record showed, and didn't the Tennessean strongly support the Gore effort to establish such voter intent?
One can only wonder what the position of the Davidson County election officials, as well as that of the Tennessean, would be if the party labels were reversed.

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Ed Wood is a resident of Sparta, TN. His column is published each Wednesday in the Crossville Chronicle.