“The voters need to feel confident that when they leave the polling place their vote counted exactly the way they wanted it to be counted,” Jeff Roberts, Davidson County’s Administrator of Elections said.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Tennessee has many checks and balances to ensure the state has accurate and trustworthy elections, including a law that took effect in Jan. 2024 that requires election commissions to produce voter-verifiable paper audit trails.
The law, which passed unanimously in 2022 and went into effect this year, mandates every county election commission to produce a “voter-verifiable paper audit trail,” which is a paper record that is marked either manually by the voter, or by a machine that the voter can check for accuracy before casting their vote. The 61 counties that did not have the machines capable of the audit were given upgraded ones by the state.
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“Voter integrity in many states has been in question. In Tennessee, we’ve done a very good job here but we could always do better,” Sen. Ed Jackson (R-Jackson), the bill’s sponsor said to lawmakers on the Senate floor before the bill passed in 2022.
“The voters need to feel confident that when they leave the polling place their vote counted exactly the way they wanted it to be counted,” Jeff Roberts, Davidson County’s Administrator of Elections said.
According to Roberts, the Davidson County Election Commission will randomly select which scanners to audit. Then, they will take the paper ballot copies voters marked and run them through a different scanner to ensure they get the same vote tally.
“That gives us a good idea from an integrity standpoint that everything happened the way it should happen on election day,” Roberts said.
Over the years, Tennessee lawmakers have passed legislation to improve election integrity, including a bill in 2012 requiring voters to show their I.D. before obtaining a ballot.
“You’ll show a photo I.D. from either the state or issued by the federal government, like a passport,” Roberts said. “We will then ensure the person standing in front of us is the person that’s there in our records.”
The General Assembly has also tightened up absentee voting requirements in recent years. A law that went into effect in 2022 added a watermark to the absentee ballot. In addition, another law requires administrators of elections to compare the voter’s signature on their absentee ballot request form to the one they have on their records, and again on the ballot envelope after it is mailed back to the election commission.
Last legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill to ensure “non-U.S. citizens” are not registered to vote by requiring administrators of elections to compare voter registration records with those of the Department of Safety.