Election panel debates ?fraud? 
By Craig Boerner    The Nashville City Paper

January 12, 2005
   
The Davidson County Election Commission is debating whether to forward potential cases of perjury or election fraud during the November presidential election to District Attorney General Torry Johnson?s office.

Commissioner Lynn Greer wants board members to join him in sending a strong message that there is a legal way to vote.

Greer said 31 provisional voters, for example, are still listed as felons who have not had their voting rights restored.

?If we have some people who have broken the law then we ought to enforce the law,? he said.

Other board members aren?t as concerned because the votes in question were caught and didn?t count.

?The provisional counting board caught the mistake. It?s not like the vote became part of the record,? Commissioner A.J. Starling said.

?They didn?t get away with it. The system works. I don?t know if we need to go any further if the system works.?

Commission staff members are working to confirm felon status and also to determine which persons were sent a notice of being purged from the voting rolls.

The staff is also investigating if previously registered felons declared their conviction on the application completed to cast a provisional ballot.

Greer?s six-part motion to be discussed at the March board meeting doesn?t stop at felons; it also includes college students and poll workers.

One request is to ?cease to hire? officers of election at precincts that allowed more than five provisional ballots from residents whose address was outside that officer?s precinct.

?If we have ineffective poll officials then we don?t need to use them again,? Greer said. ?The truth is these people were trained. They went into breakout sessions learning how to do this provisional voting and they had plenty of chances to ask questions.

By allowing 158 voters to vote at the wrong precinct, poll officials essentially ensured that the person?s vote would not count, board members said.

?To turn around and say that, because those officers allowed them to vote, we don?t need them anymore is ridiculous,? Starling said. ?? We are already having enough problems getting people to work at these polls.?

Staff is also contacting provisional voters using a university/college campus P.O. box as their address to request they prove residence in Davidson County because a person does not gain residence solely by being a student.

This motion would affect 142 provisional voters from Tennessee State University and 25 Vanderbilt University students.

?What that would do, in my opinion, is frighten people from coming to vote in the first place,? Starling said. ?If you are prosecuting folks, I?m not going to take a chance if I?m not sure. That defeats the purpose of the provisional ballots.?

Other cases include 34 provisional voters who were registered in another jurisdiction. If they voted in two jurisdictions then they could be convicted of election fraud.

Three voters were denied at early voting because they didn?t live in Davidson County but came back and voted on election day.

Greer also wants to know how many of the 693 provisional voters denied for being ?not timely registered? actually submitted a voter registration form prior to the election.