A glitch in electronic voting — apparently arising from the fact that early-voting records from a previous election were mistakenly loaded into the Election Commission’s electronic roll — has prevented or delayed sizeable numbers of Shelby County voters from casting ballots in today’s election and may provide the basis for litigation of the results.
Voters at numerous precincts found themselves turned away at their designation polling locations on the grounds that they had already voted.

Some — like Geraldine Wade, who appeared at a Thursday morning press conference of Democratic candidates and officials — were able to secure a ballot after applying for provisional paper ballots, and after their voting records were checked against the Election Commission’s written records.

But such a process was time-consuming, and it was uncertain how many of the precinct officials were fully acquainted with such remedies.

Not only was it likely that numerous voters would not be able to complete the process of casting ballots, the specter existed that manual counting of provisional paper ballots would delay vote-counting well into late Thursday night or Friday morning. And another possibility was that the provisional paper ballots could run out, leaving large numbers of voters unable to vote at all.

The morning press conference was called at the headquarters of Randy Wade, the Democratic nominee for sheriff, and several other candidates attended. “It’s a computer world, and these machines haven’t worked,” said 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, who added that human programming errors could run the gamut from “criminal” to “negligent,” once the full circumstances were known.

In any case, the problem was countywide, and Wade indicated he thought the results of the countywide general election and the state and federal primary elections could be skewed to the degree that candidates could end up having to seek recourse in the courts.

Shep Wilburn, currently a candidate for election as Juvenile Court clerk and a former member of the Election Commission, said the problem possibly stemmed from defects in the Diebold voting machines used for the election and blamed state Republican election officials for stonewalling voting-machine reforms that were authorized by the 2008 General Assembly.

Upon conclusion of the Democrats' press conference, Trustee Regina Morrison Newman, one of the participants, went to vote at her precinct and reported that she, too, had "already voted." After completing a lengthy paperwork process, Newman was allowed to vote.

Neither Bill Giannini, Election Commission chair, nor Commission executive director Rich Holden were immediately available for comment.

A statement from Election Commission headquarters was released at mid-morning, however:

During the opening of polls at 7:00 a.m., it was discovered that voters who may have voted EARLY in the May primary but had not Early Voted for the Augbust election were recognized by EPB’s (Electronic Poll Books) as having already voting in this election. In all elections, each precincts is equipped with a printed document containing the names of each participating voters in early/Absentee Voting and that is used to cross-check a voter’s eligibility.

Any voter wh believes he or she is eligible may sign a Fail-Safe Affidavit and then vote in the same manner as any other voter.

While the number of potentially affected voters is very small, the SCEC regrets any inconvenience to any voters and is committed to ensuring that any and ALL eligible voters can participate.

Updates as they become available.

The bottom line of early voting: The Republicans (whether voting in the Democratic primary to express themselves on Cohen vs. Herenton or voting in the GOP gubernatorial primary) voted higher than their usual scale for Shelby County — 43 percent, as against 56-plus percent for Democrats.

(Former mayor Willie Herenton may have a point when he stresses the distinction between the 9th District “subset” and the county totals, by the way, but that’s another tale).

The GOP can take heart from those figures, because key Democrats have made it known that they aren’t comfortable in such situations with anything less than 60 percent on their end of the ratio.

But note: The silver lining from the Democratic point of view is that they experienced a late upsurge from the 52-55 percent range they had been experiencing during most of the early-voting period. So palpable was the surge that GOP chairman Lang Wiseman, who had been one of the early drum-beaters for the Republican turnout, began treating the high-turnout talk as a danger to his side in the sense that the Democrats took alarm and began trying to compensate.

The race for Shelby County Mayor mirrors the situation, and it also measures the success of interim county mayor Joe Ford, the Democrat, in nailing down as much as he can of the white Democratic vote, concentrated in Midtown and East Memphis.

The Berje Yacoubian poll that was released on WMC-TV, Action News 5, Tuesday night is instructive. The survey, which was completed on July 28, shows Ford increasing his share of the total white vote from 6 percent to 13 percent since the last Yacoubian poll in mid-July. Overall, the proportion of the race shifted from a 46 percent to 42 percent lead for Luttrell to a 45 to 42 percent result. A slight shift, but perceptible, and one which could reflect momentum.

The poll also finds that, among those who had not voted by July 28 but planned to vote by Election Day, Thursday, August 5, Luttrell’s lead was 41 to 39k with a full 20 percent undecided.

Yacoubian estimates that if the turnout figures remain as they were during early voting, Luttrell should win the election by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent. But if the Democrats should hit their target figure of 60 percent by the close of voting on Thursday, August 5, Election Day, the winner would be Ford by the same margin.

The other countywide races — many of which are roughly balanced at the moment between the Republican and Democratic candidates — could be expected to reflect the same basic patterns.

The Republicans won Round One of the Get-Out-the-Vote contest, early-voting, but the game is still on for the election as a whole.

Democrats, many of whom have been unsettled by the relative invisibility so far of their gubernatorial nominee—to-be, Jackson businessman Mike McWherter, got assurances this week from the candidate that all of that will be changed with the ending of the primary season.

In an emailed statement asking party members for what amounts to a pro forma vote (McWherter was unopposed In the Democratic primary), he said: “In the days running up to and following the primary, I will be traveling across this great state to speak to supporters and let voters know I am dedicated to creating jobs for Tennesseans.”

Promising to “be stumping from the Mississippi River to the Smoky Mountains,” McWherter released a schedule of consecutive events beginning with his election-eve appearance Wednesday night at climactic Democratic rally at the Hunt Phelan restaurant for Shelby County candidates in the August 5 election.

McWherter’s posted itinerary has him continuing with events in Nashville on Thursday night, Chattanooga on Friday morning, and Piney Flats, a Northeast Tennessee community, on Friday night.

McWherter has also begun circulating a television ad that avoids ideological commentary and presents him as someone “more interested in fixing things than playing politics.” In his relatively few public appearances and published statements to date, McWherter has emphasized the theme of tax incentives for Tennessee-based companies.

The Willie Herenton who met with the media on Monday, with three more days to go before the 9th District Democratic primary is decided, was not the provocative, chip-on-shoulder politician they’ve seen in this election year but a calmly argumentative professional.

The former school superintendent and mayor said he had called the press conference to correct what he said were “erroneous” perceptions of the status of his contest with incumbent congressman Steve Cohen. He put the blame for such public misperception as might exist on the media — “in particular, the printed media” — for focusing on countywide early-voting data instead of patterns within the 9th District “subset.”

Herenton declared bluntly, “Since I am so distrustful of the printed media, I would have to conclude that this was not inadvertently done but was seriously contemplated by the media. “ The print media “with the aid of a biased poll, in my opinion, has tried very hard to persuade the public that Herenton is behind and Cohen is well ahead.”

(The former mayor did not specify which poll he meant — whether it was one by John Bakke with the Ethridge polling firm or another by pollster Berje Yacoubian.)

The reality, Herenton said, was “that Cohen is trailing at least with a 3-to-1 margin — especially in our highest and best performing black precincts.” He presented tables designed to show a large and preponderantly African-American turnout at specific box locations. (The conclusions and data are apparently the ones he alluded to in a fiery weekend speech in North Memphis.)

A key part of Herenton’s case was that the 8,838 early voters reported in Election Commission figures as “other” rather than black or white were preponderantly African-American. “We know that many African Americans, for a variety of reasons, have decided they don’t want to indicate race.”

An understanding of that fact would underscore the disproportion between black and white voters in the 9th District, he said. (Those figures show that, of 43,031 early voters in the Democratic primary, 26,798 were black, and 7,395 were white; treating the 8,838 voters in the “other” category as essentially black would, as Herenton said, dramatically alter the ratio.)

Media accounts suggesting that whites and Republicans were voting in unusually high numbers were irrelevant to the 9th District, where the voting pattern was “a totally different story.”

Herenton further pointed out that in 2007, he garnered his lowest number of votes as a mayoral candidate, some 65,000 votes. That compared to 55,000, the highest number of votes given Cohen in his congressional primary with Nikki Tinker in 2008.

In a question-and-answer session with reporters, Herenton acknowledged that his own projection of at least a 3-to-1 victory over Cohen did not derive from a professional pollster’s conclusions. “I don’t believe in pollsters. I’m my own best pollster,” he said.

He boasted his own skills at “disaggregating” data and his familiarity with statistics — though he conceded he’d made a ‘B’ in his statistics course at the doctoral level.

He said he was “the same candidate, whether as mayor or as congressman” that 9th District voters had always trusted, though he also conceded, “Not everyone is in love with me.”

video of Herenton's presentation:

It was not exactly a bunker — except perhaps metaphorically — but what may turn out to be Willie Herenton’s climactic appearance before a group of political supporters took place Saturday in a smallish enclosed space in North Memphis — the meeting room of city councilman Joe Brown’s district office at Jackson and Watkins.

More than anything else, it was the intense hundred-degree heat outdoors that forced the 40-odd backers of the former mayor into such a crammed, though blissfully air-conditioned, venue. Nate Jackson and other Teamsters members had set up an area for food and drink and dancing outside in the parking lot and heroically continued to toil at their posts throughout the event inside.

There was another sense besides the weather in which the meeting — billed in advance as a “North Memphis rally” — suggested a refuge for survivors. The meeting was held in the face of polls, pundits’ predictions, and a seemingly nonstop string of endorsements for Herenton’s opponent, incumbent congressman Steve Cohen, by African-American personages and institutions. And consequently the feeling of “us against the world” was palpable.

After Sidney Chism, the former Teamster head and current county commissioner who may be Herenton’s oldest and most loyal supporter, addressed the group with one of his patented over-the edge barn-burners, Herenton arrived and entered to the kind of tumultuous welcome that compensated somewhat for the size of the crowd.

And Herenton’s remarks hit some middle between the tempered and the extreme, between a show of confidence and resignation to the inevitable.

He began moderately but with a promise, appropriately cheered, “that we are going to win this election.” In its dire projections as to his electoral fate, the disbelieving media, he said, is confusing likely countywide totals with those of the9th District, which, “always remember…is a subset of the county.” And thus all those reports of higher-than-usual turnouts from white and Republican voters should be disregarded.

He promised to release the details of a poll on Tuesday, which would show, “data-wise with high predictability value of how large our margin will be.” That putative margin over Cohen could be estimated as between 3 to 1 and 4 to 1, Herenton said, “I’d like to beat him so bad I like the 4 to 1.”

Cohen’s well-documented financial edge? “I’ve never seen a dollar vote.” Nor could President Obama and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who’ve endorsed Cohen vote. “But you can vote. And you’re going to vote.” Another cheer. “The black voters are going to determine who’s going to Congress.”

“To even make this race comfortably close,” Herenton said, Cohen would have to get “six out of ten of us.” And with “our folks …voting like mad,” that was not going to happen. “You got to watch these white folks,” he warned, speaking of alleged “irregularities” that occurred during the 2006 election. “Anything goes down, you got to watch white folks counting.” That was one of the lessons learned on the slave ships, Herenton said, somewhat incongruously.

“It will not be close. Look at the demographics of the 9th Congressional District,” Herenton said. Those Democratic candidates who stayed away from him, “the same way Gore stayed away from Clinton” were going to be in trouble. “The way they win is heavily dependent on the black vote. [But] they treat me like I’ve got a plague. But see, I don’t need them. All I need is you.”

Again, he promised to release a poll with “factual information” on the probable outcome on August 5. He ridiculed pollsters “Yacoubian, Ethridge, and Bakke,” and said, “Put all of them together, and they won’t come up with one good poll.”

Herenton also mocked the figure of 35 percent that I had given WREG’s Mike Matthews in an interview as a possible high-water mark for the ex-mayor. I could not resist interjecting aloud that that number was higher than any given him in a scientific survey so far. In fact, my actual estimate of his final vote — “out of the air,” as he put it — has for some time been 33 percent, and that, I concede, is likely too high.

His “victory party” would be held at the Botanic Gardens, he said. And his final words? “It’s all good.”