The non-partisan citizen advocacy organization Common Cause Tennessee filed a lawsuit today in state court to compel the State of Tennessee to comply with a law which mandates that the voting equipment used in elections in the state be secure and reliable. A copy of the complaint can be found at http://www.commoncause.org/TNComplaint.

The law in question, the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, requires the state to replace Tennessee’s paperless voting systems with precinct count optical scan and paper ballot systems which allow for meaningful recounts and audits. Although the law was passed in 2008, the state has done little to implement it before the 2010 deadline. Common Cause Tennessee went to court today to compel the Secretary of State to implement the law. Common Cause is represented by the Nashville law firm of Branstetter, Stranch & Jennings, University of Memphis Law Professor Steven J. Mulroy, and Voter Action, a national legal advocacy organization working to protect the integrity of US elections. The lawsuit also names an individual Tennessee voter as an additional plaintiff.

Numerous studies - including the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) staff report, “Trust but Verify” (December 2007)– have concluded that the paperless touchscreen voting systems deployed in almost every county in Tennessee are vulnerable to hacking and have serious reliability problems. Software bugs and glitches can go undetected in these machines because they cannot be audited, and the outcome of elections can be changed without the voters’ knowledge or consent. To address this problem, the Tennessee State Legislature passed the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act in 2008, requiring the state to switch to a more secure and reliable paper ballot system. The law passed unanimously in the Senate and by a vote of 88 to 6 in the House.

“Tennessee voters deserve a voting system that they know will accurately record and count their votes” said Dick Williams, Chair of Common Cause Tennessee. “That is why the legislature passed this bill in 2008 and the Governor signed it into law. We are going to court today to see that the will of Tennessee citizens is honored and the law is enforced by 2010.”

The Secretary of State has long opposed implementation of optiscan by the November 2010 statutory deadline, and tried unsuccessfully to get the Legislature to extend the implementation date by 2 years this past legislative session. He claims that the 2008 Act requires that only voting machines certified to 2005 federal standards be used, and that no such machines exist. As the lawsuit will show, however, the Act's language does not require "2005 standards," and there are machines available which meet the standards of the 2008 Act.


"The law clearly requires the implementation of precinct based opti-scan machines prior to the November 2010 election. I am disappointed that the State has resorted to a tortured game of semantics in an attempt to avoid its clear obligations under the statute," said Gerard Stanch, lead counsel for plaintiffs.

“The integrity of elections in Tennessee is at stake in this case,” said John Bonifaz, legal director for Voter Action and co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “Tennessee voters have the right to have their votes be properly counted. Court intervention is now necessary to ensure that Tennessee election officials comply with the law and implement a voting system by 2010 which protects the franchise.”