Tennessee’s Constitution provides that County Election Commissions be composed of 5 members. Three are appointed by the party that has the most seats in the State House of Representatives, and two are appointed by the party with the second-largest number of Representatives.
Because Republicans won more seats than Democrats in the House of Representatives, in the November 2008 election, control of all 95 county commissions now switches from Democratic majority to Republican majority, for the first time since the 1968 election. See this story.
The Tennessee legislature appoints the Secretary of State. The current Secretary of State, Riley Darnell, is a Democrat who has served since 1993. He hopes to keep his job by persuading some Republican legislators to support him. See this story about Darnell.
Officially, neither Republican nor Democrat party exists in Tennessee.
That is, no one registers by party in Tennessee, so there is no party membership, officially.
Yet, no other parties are allowed on the ballot. (Well, OK, other parties can get on, at least theoretically, but it takes thousands of petition signatures, which means thousands of dollars and conceivably thousands of work hours. So, essentially, no other parties are allowed on the ballot.)
This also means no other parties will be allowed membership on election commissions.
And, note, all this is going on while United States military people are in danger in Iraq, allegedly to bring “democracy” to that benighted country.
The above comment is very appropriate.
It is also amusing to consider the fact that our government is trying to bring “democracy” to the Middle East when our Founding Fathers specifically opposed democracy and wanted to ensure the US was a republic.
Elf Ninos Mom (“Last Free Voice”) Is Tamara Johnson from Huntington WV
badda bing badda bang badda boom
allahu akhbar
#1: To paraphrase Justice Lewis Powell, the act of voting in a party primary is an act of affiliation with that party. If someone consistently votes in a certain party’s primary, it’s usually safe to assume that he agrees with that party’s principles.
On the other hand: in states with party registration, some voters change their registrations in order to vote in a hot primary race(s), and then change back afterward.
Tennessee is the only ex-Confederate state that has never had party runoff (or second) primaries. It would be interesting to read a transcript of the legislature’s debate on that issue. It’s obviously related to the fact that mountainous east Tennessee has been a Republican stronghold since the founding of the GOP.
In 13 of the 21 states that do not register voters by party, each primary voter’s choice of party is publicly recorded. The eight “private choice” states are HI, MT, ND, MN, MI, WI, ID, and VT.
That wacko Steve Rankin (actually one of my heroes) said, “If someone consistently votes in a certain party’s primary, it’s usually safe to assume that he agrees with that party’s principles.”
Yeah, but what if that party has no principles?