Will Shelby County's Voting Machine Issue be Resolved Anytime Soon?

Now it appears that our next round of local and state elections — the ones scheduled for August — could be in jeopardy.

Governor Bill Lee, who was relatively late in imposing shelter-in-place rules for Tennessee, has now put himself in the vanguard of the nation's state executives in casting them aside, allowing restaurants and other formerly public places to begin re-opening — though there is no evidence so far that the ominous coronavirus epidemic has sufficiently spent itself or even begun to plateau.

Though the Shelby County Commission, meeting via that Hollywood Squares-like audio-visual modality known as webinar, has formally requested a loosening of the regulations regarding absentee ballots, there is no indication as of yet that the governor nor the General Assembly, its sessions indefinitely suspended, will approve such a process. So the specter presents itself of lengthy, thinly populated, and nervously distanced voter lines like those we saw in the recent Wisconsin elections — followed, as we now know, by a spike in COVID-19 infections.

And, even should circumstances clear to the point of allowing some sense of relative comfort in going to our accustomed physical voting locations, Shelby County is experiencing delay after delay in replacing the now discredited Diebold voting machines that virtually nobody trusts. Election Administrator Linda Phillips last year set a goal of having new machines in time for the August 6th primary for county general election and primary for state/federal offices.

Read more: https://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/will-shelby-countys-voting-machine-issue-be-resolved-anytime-soon/Content?oid=22908938