A win and a loss for ballot integrity in Tennessee and why we need a ninths justice on the Supreme Court.

by Rod Williams - There was one win and one loss for ballot integrity in Tennessee last week.  

The loss: 

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the plaintiffs which included the Equity Alliance and the Tennessee AFL-CIO. Tennessee requires that first time voters have to vote in person and can not vote absentee.  To me, it makes sense that election officials want to see if this new voters is an actual person.  The Court blocked that rule. To read the ruling follow this link. 

The Win:

The 6th Circuit Court of appeal upheld the process of the State for matching signatures on absentee ballots with the signature on file. 

Plaintiffs in this case was mostly the same as in the above case. The Plaintiffs argued Tennessee's process was flawed. The current process they say leaves too much room for human error and the possibility of wrongly rejected ballots. They argue that when a ballot is rejected that the person submitting the ballot be notified and have time to correct the problem. The State argued that that was not possible given time restrains and that it was not a serious problem since few absentee ballots are rejected for that purpose. 

The Court rejected the plaintiff's case on procedural issues because the plaintiffs did not have an actual case of someone who had been harmed by this practice.  To read The Tennessean story on this follow this link. 

The need to fill the Supreme Court vacancy.

This two cases indicate the importance of filling the current Supreme Court vacancy as soon as possible.  If in either of these cases, if the same issue should come before a different district court and that court ruled the other way, then it would be up to the Supreme Court to decide the issue.  If the Supreme Court vote is a tie on an issue then the lower court decision stands.  Which means in one district a law is upheld and in another it is struck down.  This would add fuel to the fire of allocations of a stolen election and would further increase the likelihood of what I see as a potential for a Democrat coup, should the election outcome be undetermined or to close to call.  This situation would give Democrats cover for challenging the legitimacy of a Trump narrow win. There are other issues surrounding ballot integrity working their way through the courts. There is bound to be conflicting rulings from different districts. Without the Court to settle these issues there is more room for Democrat governors and the House of Representatives to make mischief and engineer a coup.

Top Stories