A court ruling saying that absentee ballot requests in Tennessee can only be distributed by qualified elections officials has been upheld by a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In 2020, Tennessee’s Secretary of State Tre Hargett was sued in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee by activists including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the AFL-CIO labor union, who claimed that in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, anyone should be able to fill out and return to county election officials an absentee ballot request form on behalf of another person, as long as the form is signed by the would-be absentee voter.
The groups claimed that since those absentee ballot request forms are now available online to Tennesseans, the law banning third parties filling out and delivering absentee ballot request forms to county elections on behalf of others was “outdated,” and said they wanted to be able to hand out the forms at polling stations and other gatherings.
They said it was a First Amendment right to hand out the applications, arguing that doing so was political speech.
The case was eventually dismissed by District Judge Eli J. Richardson.
But despite their original argument for loosening absentee ballot rules hinging on COVID-19, the activists continued to pursue legal action in the case well after the pandemic ended, appealing the ruling to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Thursday, that court upheld the lower court’s ruling.
“In the end, the Plaintiffs may well have articulated several good “policy” arguments about why Tennessee should reconsider [the law],” said Senior Judge David W. McKeague and Judge Eric E. Murphy in their decision to affirm the lower court’s ruling.
“But our job is not to decide whether the ban represents good or bad policy. That is the job of the Tennessee legislature. We may intervene to stop the enforcement of this democratically passed law only if it violates some federal standard, here the First Amendment,” the judges said. “And under the deferential free-speech rules that, at most, apply to the Plaintiffs’ claims, the ban passes constitutional muster.”
Senior Judge Helene N. White dissented.
“The majority upholds a Tennessee law that threatens to imprison persons who distribute publicly available absentee-ballot applications,” she said, arguing that distribution of absentee ballot applications by third parties was indeed political speech.
“Like many states, Tennessee makes absentee-ballot applications available online for anyone to print and download. But under Tennessee law, ‘[a] person who is not an employee of an election commission commits a Class E felony if such person gives an application for an absentee ballot to any person…'” she said. “A Class E felony carries a prison sentence of one to six years and a fine up to $3,000. Thus, in Tennessee, a grandson risks years behind bars for encouraging his grandparents over age 60 to vote by mail and handing them publicly available forms.”
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on X / Twitter.
So . . . “Here you go, one application for an absentee ballot. Understand now, this is not a ballot, it is an application for you to use if and when you find yourself unable to make it to the voting place due to health or other circumstances. Those circumstances are outlined in the law, and the application itself tells you where to go to read and determine if you actually qualify. If you believe you do, then you must decide to complete and submit the application. If the voting officials who receive it are convinced by your info that you do indeed qualify for an absentee ballot, they will then make that ballot available to you. No one else can do this for you, and you will have to sign/affirm that your info is correct and that the vote is your vote.”
My question: How can handing an application out–one that the government itself makes publicly available online and in various other ways–how can that be converted into a crime? It’s almost as if the government is admitting it does not and cannot trust its’ very own voting officials to do their job. Which would mean that the government officials are the criminals . . .
“There is a path that seems right to man then….”
Mail out , mail in ballots seems right but leads to disaster. It is too tempting to the Demoncrap voter fraud people. It has been demonstrated over and over.
Appeal the appelate!
Tennessee, and other states, need to tighten up absentee ballot voting. As was proven in many locations, the current process is very exploitable and has been severely abused.
Voting is not only a right but a responsibility. These same organizations insisting that accommodations be made to allow greater voter fraud are not interested in upholding the right to vote, they simply want to eliminate any understanding of self governance and personal responsibility.