Time for a change

Richard Holden
Richard Holden
Another election, another election night with glitches.

At this point, we don’t really know what caused the problems that marred election night 2015 in Memphis, but what we do know is that the Election Commission isn’t very good at doing elections.

In nearly every election since 2012 there has been some problem. And while some, but not most, of those problems might have been excusable, the response from the Administrator of Elections, Richard Holden, has been nothing short of disdain and ‘get off my lawn’ isms.

An audit in 2012 conducted by the State of Tennessee into the wrong ballots fiasco faulted Holden’s leadership.

The Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission gave the Election Commission a vote of no confidence after problems.

Heck, even Republican Commissioner Wyatt Bunker said enough is enough.

But this isn’t about politics, its about competence. That’s what it was about in the 2012 election when thousands of people got the wrong ballot.

And here we are again, this election, with people getting wrong ballots!

Its not that the job is easy, because it isn’t. But now 5 years into his tenure, Mr. Holden has had plenty of time to get the problems fixed, and not only have they not been fixed, there seems to be no timeline or urgency to fix them.

Taken at 12am from the Shelby County Election Commission results site
Taken at 12am from the Shelby County Election Commission results site
Election Commissioners have tried to vote him out, failing on a party line vote.

Maybe this time it will be different, maybe it won’t.

But if the Commissioners themselves won’t take the mantle that’s been given them by members of the Shelby County Delegation to the Tennessee General Assembly, then one has no other option but to assume they’re just as much a part of the problem as Holden.

We’ll see what they do at the next meeting later this month (it wasn’t posted as of the writing of this post).

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