Here’s What I Actually Think.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I have less time than I once did to stand up for what I believe in. For better or worse, that’s made me bolder. My usual silence has gotten a lot less silent.

For context: I’ve run for office in Knox County three times, once in a non-partisan city race and twice in county races where I appeared on the ballot as a Republican. I served as President of a Republican Club in Knox County. My primary voting record is 100% Republican. I meet every “bona fide” standard the state GOP can throw at me.

I’m more conservative than not. If you put a gun to my head and made me pick a party, I’d pick Republican. With those credentials out of the way, let’s move on.

I have friends who are Democrats, friends who are Independents, and friends who are Republicans. My loyalty runs in this order: God, family and friends, country. I love this country and I believe Tennessee is the best state in it. But I do not believe one party is always better than the other, and I believe a person’s character matters far more than the letter next to their name. I disagree with my own party on plenty of things. I disagree with the Democrats on plenty of things too.

The primary voting laws in this state are asinine. Let me explain why.

The Law Itself Is a Trap

T.C.A. § 2-7-115 makes it illegal to vote in a primary for a party you don’t belong to. To qualify, you must be a “bona fide member” of the party, or declare your allegiance to the party at the moment you vote. Violating that statute can be charged as a misdemeanor under T.C.A. § 2-19-102 or as a Class D felony under T.C.A. § 2-19-107. Every polling place in Tennessee is required by law to post a yellow sign warning you of all of this. Walk into your precinct on primary day and look for it. It’s there.

Two problems.

First, “bona fide” isn’t defined anywhere in Tennessee law. Not in statute, not in regulation. The parties define it themselves. Now, political parties have a constitutional right to set their own membership criteria, that’s settled First Amendment associational law going back to Cousins v. Wigoda and Democratic Party of U.S. v. Wisconsin. What parties do not have is the right to use the criminal machinery of the state to enforce a definition the legislature itself has refused to codify. You cannot have a felony statute whose elements are filled in by the internal rules of a private organization. That is exactly the kind of vagueness problem courts have struck down for decades, and the League of Women Voters of Tennessee currently has federal litigation pending on essentially this point.

Second, the “declare allegiance” prong is a fig leaf. Read the statute. T.C.A. § 2-7-115(b)(2) requires the voter, “at the time the voter seeks to vote,” to declare allegiance to the party and to state an intent to affiliate. The mandatory yellow sign at § 2-7-115(c) makes the criminal trigger explicit: it is a violation to declare allegiance “without the intent to affiliate.” Whatever mental state the law cares about, it cares about it at that moment, because that is when the declaration is made and when the criminal act, if there is one, occurs. That is bedrock criminal law: the required mental state has to exist when the act is committed, not afterward. If I sincerely declare allegiance with genuine intent on Tuesday, cast my ballot, and then have a real change of heart by the following weekend, I have violated nothing.

And here’s the deeper point: my loyalty does not, and should not, belong unconditionally to any private organization. A party’s platform shifts. Its leadership changes. Pledging unwavering allegiance to a political party is ethically backwards. If we actually believed our own conservative principles about limited government and the right to dissent, we would understand that allegiance to a party must always be conditional on whether that party is right.

So either the General Assembly defines “bona fide membership” in statute and creates a process for parties to file that definition with the Secretary of State, Election Commission, someone, or party officials need to stop threatening voters with criminal prosecution under a standard the law itself does not supply. Pick one.

Public Money, Private Club

In much of Tennessee, and Knox County in particular, we are deeply red. In most races, the primary is the election. In some county races, there is not even a Democratic candidate on the ballot.

The standard response is that you do not have a right to vote in a primary because primaries are how parties choose their nominees. In theory, I could get behind that. In practice, there is a problem.

Taxpayers pay for primary elections. County election commissions, funded by you and me, run them. Voting machines, poll workers, ballots, polling places, public money pays for all of it, for the benefit of two private organizations. If primaries are private party functions, then the parties should pay for them. If a party cannot raise enough money from its own members to fund its own nomination process, that is a message about the strength of its platform, not a license to keep using public dollars to run a closed club.

You cannot have it both ways. Either it is a public election open to the public, or it is a private party function paid for with private money.

The Races That Are Actually Decided in May

In Knox County, the May primary frequently decides who serves as Sheriff, Trustee, County Clerk, Register of Deeds, and a long list of other county offices. The August “general election” for those offices is, in practice, a formality, the Republican primary winner often walks in unopposed because no Democrat files at all. The 2022 Sheriff’s race is a textbook example: the contest was fully resolved in May, four months before any “general” took place, because no one was running on the other side.

Turnout in those May primaries is routinely below 20%, sometimes in the teens. Tennessee ranked dead last, 51st of 51, counting the District of Columbia, in voter turnout in 2022, and we consistently sit in the bottom tier of the Cost of Voting Index. A fraction of a fraction of the eligible electorate is choosing the people who actually run our county government.

Two points on this.

If a race has no general-election opponent, every voter should be able to cast a ballot in the race that decides it. The “you can write someone in” answer is a fantasy. Write-in campaigns do not win, especially against unopposed nominees on a paper ballot. Citizens with a constitutional right to vote are being denied a real voice in the only election that matters for that office.

Most of these offices have no legislative power anyway. The Sheriff enforces the law. The Trustee collects taxes. The Clerk maintains records and car tags. The Register records deeds. None of them writes policy. None of them casts votes that bind anyone. Why does their party affiliation determine who picks them? Legislative and executive offices, where party platform actually matters, are a different conversation. A Sheriff is not.

What I Actually Want

I want statesmen and stateswomen running our county and this country. People who will fight when the fight is necessary and keep their mouths shut when it is not. People who remember they serve the public, not the other way around. Leaders who can reach across the aisle when necessary. People who understand that good leadership is forged by trial and study, not by getting more votes than the other guy in a primary that 14% of the eligible electorate showed up to.

Targeting voters and elected officials with criminal threats, from party organizations whose own internal divisions keep spawning splinter groups every other election cycle, is not how you fix a broken political culture. It is a symptom of one. Both parties’ leadership has lost its way. I am not picking sides on that.

I hold strong beliefs. I will not compromise them. But I will also not pretend the law says what it doesn’t, or that loyalty to a party should ever come before loyalty to the people that party is supposed to serve.

We can do better. We have to.