Tennessee is ranked 49th in voter turnout. Why aren't residents voting like they should?

Natalie Allison | The Tennessean

Ranked second to last in the nation for voter turnout and nearly as bad in voter registration, Tennessee is faced with a problem: Getting residents to the polls.

Among those concerned about civic engagement in the state, it’s a ranking that raises a question.

Why aren’t Tennesseans voting like they should?

Tasked with answering that question and suggesting what the state can do to encourage more residents to vote, Secretary of State Tre Hargett, U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Nashville, state Sen. Steve Dickerson, R-Nashville, and Shanna Hughey, president of ThinkTennessee, took the stage Monday in a forum sponsored by The Tennessean and Lipscomb University.

“If we were talking about economic development or level of taxation or anything like that, we would pretty much demand that Tennessee be top five in America — maybe even No. 1,” Cooper said. “In the economic area we demand so much more. But in the democracy area, it’s OK to drag bottom? I don’t think so.”

Why aren't Tennesseans voting more? Civility Tennessee has some answers Ranked second to last in the nation for voter turnout and nearly as bad in voter registration, Tennessee is faced with a problem: Getting residents to the polls.

Pew’s Election Performance Index ranked Tennessee 49th in the nation for voter turnout in 2016 and 45th in voter registration.

Voter turnout in Nashville was lower in 2015 mayoral election than 1971

Cooper, like Dickerson, pointed to the bipartisan pair of lawmaker’s Project Register, an initiative they launched in 2017 to encourage Middle Tennessee employers to incorporate online voter registration in their onboarding process, as well as to increase voter registration among high school students.

“Steve Dickerson and I thought it was deeply disturbing that a great city like Nashville had more voters in 1971 than we did in a recent election,” Cooper said, comparing the number of votes cast in the mayoral election that year versus 2015.

In Nashville’s 2015 mayoral election, 6,000 fewer residents voted than in 1971, despite the city’s population having grown by 206,000 people during that time.

“Something is very wrong with that picture,” Cooper said.

'Somehow in this area, some people love red tape'

Hargett, whose office oversees elections, likened the dilemma and his role in encouraging citizens to vote to him being the chef of a dining establishment.

“We open the restaurant and we prepare the dinner, but we can’t make people eat,” he said.

He cited the state’s creation of a social media campaign, #GoVoteTN, as an example of how his office is asking voters to urge their friends and acquaintances to also vote, as well as efforts to help register high school students, and essay contests and mock elections that involve younger children in the discussion.

He pointed to the state’s online voter registration system — Tennessee was the 37th in the country to roll out such a feature in September 2017 — and an app with voting information and results.

But throughout the discussion Monday, Cooper repeatedly referred to state legislators’ need to act to make it easier for Tennessee residents to cast a ballot.

“Somehow in this area, some people love red tape,” Cooper said. “They love paperwork. They love making it complicated.”

He drew applause from the audience when he suggested the state needed to “stop suppressing the vote.”

Tens of millions of federal dollars unused for Tennessee elections

Cooper offered several suggestions, including implementing one-stop voter registration; allowing residents a choice of polling places, such as what Rutherford County has done; and linking voter registration data with the state driver’s license database to clean and update voting data.

Voters in Tennessee must register at least 30 days before an election.

He pointed to the need for an Albert sensor, a device recommended to election administrators by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that continually monitors election databases for signs of hacking or outside intrusion.

Cooper described Tennessee’s election machines as “some of the most dated and hackable in America.”

He noted that there were tens of millions of unspent federal dollars available to Tennessee to improve elections, much of which comes from the Help America Vote Act.

On the topic of voter fraud, Hughey reminded the audience that following the 2016 election, the Secretary of State’s office found 42 instances of suspected voter fraud out of the 4.3 million votes cast in Tennessee.

Hargett’s response wasn’t well-received by the audience, some of whom booed and jeered at his suggestion that voter fraud could have been more widespread than his office had determined.

“Those are 42 reports,” Hargett said. “And it’s like saying the only people who were speeding on the interstate are the ones who got tickets.”

For his part to expand access to the ballot, Dickerson said he planned to work with Nashville-based Project Return to introduce legislation to make it easier for men and women being released from prison to have their voting rights restored.

The deadline to register to vote for the Nov. 6 election is Oct. 9. Early voting in that election begins Oct. 17 and continues through Nov. 1, though early voting is currently underway for Nashville’s Sept. 6 vice mayoral runoff election.

Reach Natalie Allison at nallison@tennessean.com. Follow her on Twitter at @natalie_allison.