Tennessee elections roundup

In addition to the high-profile race for the U.S. Senate, there were other elections held in Tennessee on Tuesday.

Incumbent Governor Phil Bredesen beat the Republican challenger by a whopping 69% margin as expected. Gov. Bredesen is listed on the ballot as a Democrat, but he is also popular with Republicans for keeping his "no income tax" pledge, his business friendly positions, corporate relocation incentives, and for "fixing" TennCare by booting nearly 200,000 people off the state's Medicaid program.

In national elections, Tennessee's Congressional delegation will have two Republican Senators and a 5-4 Democrat majority in the House of Representatives. The respective parties retained all their House seats. There were two open seats. One was retained by Republicans and other (Ford's) was retained by Democrats. All other seats were retained by the incumbents.

As Chris mentioned yesterday, Republicans maintained control of the Tennessee Senate 17-16 with Democrats picking up one seat, and Democrats retained control of the Tennessee House 53 to 46.

For those keeping score at home, despite voting twice for Bush Tennessee is more purple than red with a Democratic governor, a Democratic majority in the Tennessee House, and a Democratic majority in the United States House of Representatives.

As noted by Sue earlier, there are no widespread reports of voting problems around the state.

Record turnout for a mid-term resulted in long lines and some polls staying open later than usual. Here in East Tennessee, one Blount Co. polling place had a two-hour delay because of machine problems.

In Knox County, an early voting machine malfunctioned, leaving 2600 votes "stranded." The machine manufacturer dispatched technicians, who took the machine to a local lab to remove memory chips from the motherboard and install them on another mother board so they can hopefully be counted.

Two races hang in the balance, one involving a charter amendment to establish a defined benefit pension plan for uniformed sheriff's department officers, and another for a hotly contested State House of Representatives seat which has already been called for the Republican candidate despite a margin of only 1700 votes with 2600 votes still not counted.

(This just in as I was typing: the votes were retrieved, the outcome of the Tennessee House race was unaffected, and the pension passed by a narrow margin.)

This situation highlights the real problem with electronic voting machines. Without a human readable record, there is no way to recount or even verify if the votes are accurately recorded, and there is no way to retrieve the votes in case of a major system/hardware failure. Fortunately, disaster was averted in this case and Knox County will now be able to certify the election. Going forward, reliability of this type of system architecture and design should be more cause for concern than fears of fraud or malicious voting machine manipulation.

Finally, the debate as to whether Harold Ford Jr. lost his bid for the U.S. Senate because of his race has begun in earnest. Ford said during a "thank you" stop in Knoxville today that he didn't believe that his race was a factor, but he is who he is and there's nothing he can do about that. As noted here earlier, Ford got 150,000 more votes than the white Democrat in the 2002 mid-term election, and nearly as many as Lamar Alexander who won. On the other hand, exit polls show Ford receiving 40% of the white vote v. 59% for Corker.

In other exit poll news, Tennessee voters gave thumbs down to a 2008 bid for president by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.