General Discussion

The claim in the source article at This Will Hold (TWH) is that the vote totals jumped from 148,853 at 99.4% reporting to 179,899 at 100%, indicating some kind of ballot stuffing or vote dumping of about 31,000 votes. There is no evidence for this claim.

I do not offer this rebuttal to say that Republicans are not cheating elections. They are already doing so through legislation, specifically gerrymandering and legal barriers to voting. I offer this to try to see clearly what is and isn't happening in elections to give Republicans an unfair advantage. I do not feel it helpful for Democrats to have unsubstantiated vote-flipping or ballot stuffing conspiracy theories mirroring the same conspiracy theories we derided when put forward by Republicans.

1. TWH does not offer any evidence for their claim. They show one graphic from NBC showing a vote total of 179,889 but do not show a timeline of when votes were reported. A timeline is needed to show the jump from 148,853 to 179,899. They also show a graphic of voter turnout (x-axis) vs vote percent by party (y-axis) for only one county. This graph shows that when voter turnout increases, the Republicans do better. This does not have any bearing on the primary claim regarding the 31,000 votes. (Note: It actually makes sense that in a region where Republican registration outnumbers Democratic, the more people that vote means the vote totals mirror the registration totals. )

2. DDHQ, a cited source in the article, does not offer evidence for the claim. The numbers presented were taken from the Decision Desk Headquarters (DDHQ). The only graphic shows 179,899 votes with ">95%" reporting. There is no timeline, which again is needed to show the 31,000 vote jump.

3. The local Democratic party has observers during the entire voting process. They observe polling stations during early voting, during same day voting, and during mail in ballot acceptance and counting. These people are deeply familiar with Tennessee law and voting processes. If they are not raising alarms, then there are likely no alarms to raise. It is unlikely that people not intimately affiliated with the local elections are going to find any anomalies the Democrats on site missed. The Shelby County elections commission site has a great explainer of the voting process from start to finish.

4. Per Tennessee law, all elections are subject to audit as a routine part of the process, and Democrats participate in the audit process. The selection of what is audited is random, which makes it harder to hide cheating. (Note: This appears to be a standard procedure nationally. I know we do the same in Florida.)

5. There is no motivation for the local Republican party to violate Tennessee law and make national news. This is a heavily gerrymandered district in a reliably Republican state. As much as Behn outperformed past elections, there was little risk to the Republicans that they would lose a fair election. They had no need to cheat.