High Early-Vote Turnout for Special Election

Lines stretched into the parking lot at Metro’s only early voting site this weekend in downtown Nashville. But many withstood the cold wind to vote on the two proposed charter amendments, making Saturday’s turnout the highest.

Over 13,000 people cast ballots during the early-voting period for this week’s special election—nearly 1,500 of those were totaled in the three hours of voting on Saturday.

Voter Nancy Stabell says she voted against the English-only amendment.

“I don’t think it’s good for Nashville’s image. I don’t think it sets a view of a friendly city and it won’t help us as we try and generate jobs and bring businesses to Nashville.”

Voter James Fritz says he supported the amendment to require all Metro Government communications to be in English. He says government shouldn’t be paying for translation services.

“What I object to is taking it to the level where we’ve got to pay everybody to—all the languages and that’s just too much.”

But Fritz didn’t support the second proposal. It would make it easier to get charter amendments on the ballot via voter petition and would prevent the Metro Council from modifying the amendments for four years. Fritz says governing documents should be difficult to change.

Metro’s Election Administrator, Ray Barrett, says early voting turnout for the two charter amendments is above the last special election held in 2005.

“The special election in ‘05, that tax question, and we didn’t do but 10,000 early voting.”

The proposal to raise Metro’s sales tax by a half-cent did not pass.

Special elections have traditionally low turnout and just over 16 percent of active voters cast ballots for the sales tax referendum. To provide some perspective, nearly 70 percent of registered voters filled out ballots in the recent November presidential election.

Earlier: English Only Comes Down to PR Battle
Later: Study Finds Tennessee More Reliant on Universities Than Rest of Nation