Metro Pulse/Insights/Election Commission

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by Joe Sullivan

The Knox County Election Commission and its staff have caught a lot of flak for snafus on Election Day. System glitches stalled tabulation of ballots and reporting of results until hours after the polls had closed. Overloaded telephone lines at the commission's headquarters prevented precinct officers in the field from getting through to clarify the registration status of would-be voters who weren't on their precinct rolls. And there were reports of lassitude in the handling, if not the counting, of absentee ballots.

Underlying these symptoms of seeming unpreparedness are fundamental questions about the way in which the Election Commission is constituted and its staff selected. The five members of the commission hold responsibilities that need to be fulfilled with nonpartisan rectitude, yet they are selected in a totally partisan way. And that, in turn, gives rise to the perception that the post of administrator of elections is a patronage job awarded by the party that controls the majority of the seats on the commission.

Under state law, as long as the Democrats retain control of the state Legislature, Democrats will continue to get three of the five seats on the commission with the other two going to Republicans. Independents need not apply. As a practical matter, these three Democrats are picked by the Democrat members of Knox County's legislative delegation, which presently boils down to Rep. Joe Armstrong and Rep. Harry Tindell. Since Armstrong is the more senior and forceful of the two, he's widely viewed as the power broker. (By contrast, the power to pick the two Republicans is dispersed among Knox County's seven GOP legislators.)

The same holds where selection of the commission's staff is concerned. While its administrator of a full-time staff of eight, Pat Crippins, is accountable to the commission on an ongoing basis, she is widely viewed as Armstrong's hand-picked candidate for the job. When she was named to the post in 1997, only one Republican commissioner, Steve Roth, had the temerity to support any of the other seemingly well-qualified candidates who had sought and been interviewed for the job.

Yet for all of these appearance problems, the fact is that the Election Commission is made up of highly capable members who function cohesively and conscientiously. Roth and Democrat David Eldridge are two of Knoxville's most able younger attorneys. Democrat Anne Woodle is a highly regarded former member of the school board, and Republican Al Bell is a veteran school administrator. The commission's Democrat chairman, attorney Mark Brown, gets high marks from members of both parties.

Moreover, it's hard to question Crippins' qualifications for her job. When she applied for the $73,490-a-year post, she was serving as the manager of the Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committee's East Neighborhood Center. And she gets high marks from CAC's Executive Director Barbara Kelly for her work spanning 30 years at this agency that runs an array of social service programs. "Pat was a highly motivated person who demonstrated excellent leadership and communication skills," says Kelly.

One problem she faced at the commission was that hardly any of its other staff positions paid salaries more than a third of her own. Over the past two years, she lost her two ablest and most experienced deputies, Jeffrey Gleason and Tish Kesterman, to substantially higher paying jobs. "It's been very hard to hold or attract good people within the salary range set by the county," Crippins says. But her appeals for a higher pay scale went unheeded. According to the county's director of finance and administration, Kathy Hamilton, "Our salary studies show that all of the positions at the Election Commission are in line with the range for other county employees, and getting them out of line creates its own set of problems."

Also contributing to Crippins' difficulties of late has been a life-threatening kidney ailment for which she needs a transplant. She insists the energy shots she's been taking for several months "keep me going in the meantime." But Brown acknowledged at a hearing last week that Crippins "wasn't feeling well" on the day when cartridges containing the results of early voting were removed from voting machines an hour prior to the time set for witnesses to be present.

With recognition that mistakes were made, the Election Commission is now striving to prevent their recurrence in the future. At its meeting on Monday, there seemed to be a consensus that a consulting firm should be hired to evaluate procedures and to identify any additional resources that may be needed. But the commission stopped short of setting a selection process in motion in part because of lack of clarity as to the consultant's role, and in part because of uncertainty as to how it would relate to the workings of the Knox County Efficiency Panel that has already been mandated to assess the operations of all arms of county government.

Something else that ought to be evaluated is whether the commission itself could be selected in a less partisan way. One possible model could be the way in which the Knox County school board recently placed the election of its members on a non-partisan basis whereas they used to be elected on party lines. But the composition of Election Commission is a matter of state law, and the party in power in Nashville isn't about to give up its control over the selection process.

"The longer I've watched it, the more I've concluded it will always be partisan. The key is to make sure that it includes appropriate checks and balances," says former Sen. Bud Gilbert, a Republican who made his mark as a champion of clean government legislation.

The integrity of elections also turns on the caliber of the workers who oversee them, and Knox County should put more of a premium on getting more capable and motivated people in these jobs.