The Count Down Voting for mayor is more complicated than you think. by JOHN BRANSTON t sounds simple. Open the polls, close the polls, count the votes, and announce the winner. That's pretty much how it works on election day, but as Willie Herenton and Harold Ford can tell you, the devil is in the details. Throw into the mix early voting, absentee voting, malfunctioning computers, "voter assistants," inexperienced poll workers, the no-runoff provision, and Memphis' penchant for the unexpected and the mayor's race could get crazy. Especially if it turns out to be a nailbiter between Herenton and Joe Ford. It's not like it hasn't happened before. Harold Ford, who is managing his brother Joe's campaign, was elected to Congress in 1974 in a race so close that television stations announced his opponent, Dan Kuykendall, as the winner on the 10 p.m. news. Only some furious eleventh-hour ballot counting, with Ford himself standing by, gave Ford the victory. And in 1991, Herenton, with Ford's support, defeated incumbent mayor Dick Hackett by 142 votes out of 247,973 votes cast. The outcome, much less the margin, wasn't finalized until the absentee ballots were counted after midnight due to a computer problem. Even then, a discrepancy between signatures on the poll list and votes cast in some precincts cast doubt on the result, which Hackett declined to challenge. Before Thursday's election, 43,904 Memphians had voted at one of the early-voting sites around town. "The ballots are counted on election day, but we are not allowed to release those results until after the polls close at 7 p.m.," says Election Commission Chairman O.C. Pleasant. Then there are absentee votes, a paper ballot cast by someone unable to vote early or at the polls due to illness or confinement. In 1991 there were more than 3,000 of them, but the number should be smaller this year because of early voting. These ballots are scanned by computers and counted on election day, probably by 3 p.m. When the polls close at 7 p.m., an election official removes a cartridge from each of the computerized voting machines and takes it to one of five sites. The results are fed into the election central computer. If a voter needs assistance because of bad eyesight, illiteracy, or computer phobia, he or she can designate a voter assistant to help. Already there have been charges from the Ford and Herenton camps of overly aggressive "assistance," but the process itself is legal. "Any voter has the right to request assistance," says Pleasant. "It can be anyone of the voter's choice." The five election commissioners themselves are partisan, both as to party affiliation and, in some cases, candidate preference. One of them, Yvonne Acey, attended a commission meeting while wearing a Herenton button. She has also signed an endorsement ad for Herenton. "Nowhere in the law does it require them to be nonpartisan," says Pleasant. "All of us get to the commission as a result of our partisan politics, either Republican or Democrat." But another commissioner, Greg Duckett, thinks it's a bad idea for commissioners to flaunt their candidate preference. "Members should go out of their way to ensure that they are impartial as it relates to the administration of the electoral process," says Duckett. "Perception matters, and it is difficult to convince someone of a lack of bias when a person would exhibit bias, even in another context." In 1991, handwritten signatures as well as computers caused problems. After entering a polling place, a voter signs what is called the poll list. In 1991, there were an unprecedented 609 more votes than signatures on the poll list -- or more than four times Herenton's victory margin. An election audit failed to pinpoint the exact cause of this discrepancy, but Hackett's acceptance of the results made it a moot point. "My position then as it is now is that there were not overvotes," says Pleasant, adding that he saw no evidence of fraud. Before Herenton's historic election, the standard for election-night excitement was Harold Ford's victory 25 years ago. In 1974, Ford beat Kuykendall by 744 votes out of more than 134,000 votes cast. The election came down to six ballot boxes from Ford-dominated precincts. Trailing by several thousand votes late on election night, Ford rushed to the election commission to make sure the boxes were counted. When they finally were, they gave him the victory. One thing there won't be in the mayoral election is a runoff, even if the winner falls well short of 50 percent of the vote, which seems likely. The runoff provision was put into the Memphis mix in 1966 when white voters were in the majority. In 1982 it kept J. O. Patterson Jr. from becoming the first black mayor of Memphis, even though he won 42 percent of the vote to Hackett's 29 percent. Nine years later, at the urging of the NAACP and the U.S. Department of Justice under former President George Bush, the runoff provision in the mayor's race was struck down by U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner, just in time to benefit Herenton, who got 49.4 percent of the vote. The NAACP and Justice argued that runoffs diluted black voting strength. With blacks now enjoying something like a 60-40 majority in Memphis, the argument looks flawed in hindsight. Herenton raised over $800,000, most of it from whites. Many of his supporters are white, as they were in 1995 when he got 70 percent of the vote. Two of his main challengers, Joe Ford and Shep Wilbun, are black. Ford, like Herenton, has a professionally produced radio and television campaign, contrary to the old argument that black candidates couldn't afford citywide media access. A final irony: the next mayor of Memphis could well win the job with roughly one-third of the vote, but some city council candidates still need a majority. The elimination of the runoff applies only to citywide races.