County Must Store Amendment 1 Election Data

The DeKalb County Election Commission will extract and store the November 14 election results because of a pending legal challenge to the passage of amendment 1
The State Election Commission has ordered all of Tennessee’s County Election Commissions to extract all the November 14 election data from voting machines, and store in an external device.
DeKalb County Voting machine technicians, County Election Commissioners representing both parties and a technician from the voting machine company, Microvote, will be present for the extraction, which is set for 4 p.m. September 10 at the election office.
“The extraction became necessary because the lawsuit has yet to be resolved, and at some point, those machines will have to be loaded with the March 1 Presidential Preference and DeKalb Democratic Party Primary candidates,” said Dennis Stanley, Administrator of Elections. “Because we have no concrete date on when the litigation will be resolved, we have no choice but to extract that data, preserve it should it be needed as evidence in the lawsuit, and make plans for the March elections.”
The lawsuit is challenging how the state calculated the votes for Amendment 1- a Constitutional Amendment giving the Tennessee General Assembly more leeway in enacting abortion regulations.
It is argued that the state’s constitution says for an amendment to pass, voters of the state have to “approve and ratify such amendment or amendments by a majority of all citizens voting for Governor, voting in their favor.”
The lawsuit, filed on November 7, 2014, claims because of how the State Constitution is worded, the state should have only counted the votes of those who case a ballot in both the Governor’s race as well as Amendment 1.
However, State Election officials maintain Tennesseans have a right to vote or not vote for Governor and any other way “would not make sense.”
According to the final election totals from November, about 30,000 more people cast ballots for Amendment 1 than cast ballots in the Governor’s race. However, the Amendment won by approximately 70,000 votes.