Metro Voting Official Expects Light Turnout Thursday

Thursday’s election vote total in Nashville probably won’t compare with the turnout four years ago. According to a Metro election official, only about one in four Davidson County voters is expected to cast a ballot.

Albert Tieche is the Metro administrator of elections. He believes the election for mayor and city council, and the referendum on the state fairgrounds will likely draw around seventy thousand voters. That’s about 25 percent of active voters in Nashville; and a long way from the hundred-thousand votes cast four years ago, when the mayor’s office was hotly contested.

Plus, voting may be slowed during Election Day.

Council districts have been redrawn, to even out voting strength following the 2010 census. Tieche says about 30 percent of Metro voters will have a change of voting place. Those folks got new voter registration cards in the mail.

“Now if they all look at their new cards, it’ll tell ’em where to go, and they can avoid some confusion, and find out where to go. Or they can go on our website, and find out where to go. Or they can go on the state’s website, and find out where to go.”

Poll workers will redirect voters who show up at the wrong voting location on Thursday.

Not every voter with a new voting location is in a new district. Precinct lines within districts have also shifted.

WEB EXTRA
To ‘find out where I vote’ from the Davidson County Election Commission, click here.

The Tennessee Department of State’s elections coordinator maintains this link.

In 14 days of early voter some 33,050 Nashvillians turned out, with 4,517 casting their ballots on the last day. Here’s the Davidson County Election Commission link to the day-by-day early voting chart.

Note these comparisons from the bottom of the above chart:

Total Registered Active Voters in the county — 285,178
Total Registered Active and Inactive voters — 345,687

Measured against active voters, the turnout so far is 11.59 percent.

Tieche says manning the many voting locations requires calling on an army of one-day workers,.

We’ll have about a thousand, maybe 1100, working for us this election, and we could not do it without those people, really appreciate having them.

Here’s the link to the last Metro election, in 2007.

Here’s the general link to election turnout statistics in Davidson County back through 1963 – with some early votes on proposed city-county consolidation. Before 1963, Davidson County and the City of Nashville were separate – Metro dates only to 1963.