News analysis: The Kurita Conundrum

A lot of questions have been swirling around as to how the Tennessee Democratic Executive Committee could throw out the Democratic State Senate primary "won" by incumbent Rosalind Kurita. While a number of legal reasons were used, the genesis of this recent action begins in the mountains of the farthest reaches of the state.

For those who have casually watched this drama at home, let’s see if we can explain how all of this took place.

Kurita has not been in the good graces of Tennessee Democrats since Jan. 9, 2007. On that day, she shocked her colleagues by voting to install Republican State Sen. Ron Ramsey as lieutenant governor, ending the 36-year stranglehold on the office held by John Wilder.

The move permanently fractured an already tenuous relationship she had with members of her own caucus, but landed her the job as Speaker Pro Tempore of the State Senate — appointed by Ramsey. It was an uncomfortable position, however, since her Democratic colleagues largely ignored her the rest of the legislative session.

Fast-forward to this election cycle and Democrats hungry for payback found a willing challenger for the Democratic Primary in Clarksville attorney Tim Barnes.

Both Barnes and Kurita campaigned hard and it showed on election day. Barnes won the vote in Montgomery and Houston counties, but Kurita carried Cheatham County and was close enough in the other two counties to win the race by 19 votes. Or so we thought.

At the same time this race was going on, a hotly contested Republican primary in Northeast Tennessee featured first-term Congressman David Davis trying to hold off a challenge from Johnson City Mayor Phil Roe.

On primary election day, Roe bested Davis by 486 votes. In many respects, that is where Kurita's win took a fateful turn.

Immediately after his loss, Davis started making noise that a "well-funded and systematic effort" to have Democrats vote for Roe cost him his job. The 1st Congressional District has been in Republican hands since 1881 and Democrats have no chance of winning the seat in November's General Election.

Davis pointed to a state law that, in his opinion, barred "cross-over" voting — plumping for a member of one political party but retaining allegiance to another political party. That is difficult to prove in Tennessee because voters don't register their party affiliation.

The state law Davis quoted says "a registered voter is entitled to vote in a primary if: "The voter is a bona fide member of and affiliated with the political party in whose primary the voter seeks to vote; or, at the time the voter seeks to vote, the voter declares allegiance to the political party ... and states that the voter intends to affiliate with that party."

With that, Davis began openly considering filing a challenge with the Tennessee Republican Party. That move seemed to spark some interest from a guy just down the road, Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey.

In The Times-News, a Tri-Cities newspaper, Ramsey called any challenge by Davis a "major mistake," adding that "you declare the way you are voting when you walk into a voting booth, it would be very hard to prove that there was concerted effort to get Democrats to vote in a Republican primary or vice versa. Even if you could prove that, I don't see it's illegal."

Meanwhile, back in Clarksville, the Davis demise was being watched and Ramsey's interjection caught notice. The feeling among Democrats was Ramsey was speaking less to the 486-vote margin in his home district and more to the 19-vote margin being held by his Democratic ally in Kurita.

Democrats, knowing that no Republican had filed to run in the general election against Kurita, smelled opportunity. Barnes quickly filed paperwork challenging the election, saying that the vote was "incurably uncertain" due to voter irregularities.

Over the course of the next few weeks, while most of the top politicos in the state were at their respective conventions, Barnes and his legal team led by Nashville attorney George Barrett found other ammunition to bolster their claims.

They pointed to other events that took place on election day that they say violated election law, including a poll worker telling voters to vote in the Republican primary for Barnes and claims that Kurita solicited votes while citizens were standing in line to cast their ballot.

Filing a brief on behalf of Kurita was none other than the Democrat Republicans love to hate most: former State Sen. Bob Rochelle of Lebanon. Rochelle was a frontline proponent of former Gov. Don Sundquist's income-tax proposal.

Rochelle argued that the position taken by Barnes was flawed and said publicly that the case was about revenge for Kurita's vote for Ramsey.

As we all know now, the Tennessee Democratic Executive Committee voted 33-11 that the election was "incurably uncertain" and threw out the result from election day. They then charged the Montgomery, Houston and Cheatham County Democratic parties with naming their candidate, most likely Barnes.

Kurita has since filed the necessary paperwork to run as an "official write-in candidate," telling Post Politics’ A.C. Kleinheider, "I think it's obvious why this step was necessary. This is America. You don't just let someone steal an election."

Not ever needing to be prompted to send out a press release, the Tennessee Republican Party has predictably sent out a missive decrying the actions of its rivals and charging it with "disenfranchising voters."

As all of this is happening, the guy who started the talk — soon-to-be-former Congressman David Davis — is packing up his boxes in Washington, D.C. Wonder what he thinks? Well, he told the Knoxville News-Sentinel that "both parties ought to have the right to choose their nominee, and the Tennessee Democratic Party in my mind did the right thing by following Tennessee state law."

Davis will likely not be speaking at State Senate Republican fund-raisers anytime soon.