The Sullivan County Election Commission’s vote Tuesday to fire the longtime elections administrator and replace her with the county’s GOP chairman is a political ploy that has destroyed the public’s expectation of bipartisanship for a panel that manages elections.
Republican commissioners ousted Gena Frye, a Democrat who held the position for 13 years, and appointed Jason Booher, an insurance salesman from Bristol, Va., and – until after Tuesday’s vote – the county’s Republican Party chair.
Why was Frye fired? The only explanations – that the incumbent was slow to give commissioners information on new voting machines and was difficult to work with – sound more like excuses. The more likely explanation is that Republicans, flush with a majority in Nashville for the first time in years, have decided to roll over their opponents in a local power grab.
Betsy Shine, one of two Democrats on the commission, fears the party-line vote that elevated Booher to office will become commonplace. She also has charged that her GOP colleagues violated Tennessee’s open meetings law by interviewing potential successors to Frye in private.
The GOP commissioners concede they never advertised the job, but accepted résumés and narrowed the secret applicant pool down to Booher and another Republican, Suzy Eleas.
Commission Chairman James Holmes denied any violations of the state’s Sunshine Law, which requires two or more officials to hold meetings in public with the proper notice made to the media and public. The commission may have dodged the open meetings law question by never questioning applicants with two commissioners at the same time.
Even so, the spirit of that law was obliterated.
Holmes needs to re-examine the spirit of that law and assure all county residents that the commission’s work will be done in public and subject to transparency and accountability. Instead, Holmes’ defending secretive interviews raises questions of back-room deals and impropriety.
In addition, if Frye was fired on the basis of her political affiliation, that would violate a recent attorney general’s opinion barring election commissioners from using that as a sole measuring stick.
Absent reprimands or disciplinary actions in her personnel file, Frye should be reinstated as elections administrator immediately. Otherwise, it appears that Booher’s service as GOP chair has just been rewarded with a plum, $66,000-a-year job.
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