Shelby County commissioners Monday, July 26, voted down a $3.9 million contract to buy a new voting system for the 2022 election cycle.

And the body then voted to take its own bids for a new system based on hand-marked paper ballots, effectively taking the Shelby County Election Commission out of the process if the vote stands.

The 2-8 vote across party lines on the existing contract, for touch-screen machines with a paper trail fed through a digital scanner, sends the matter back to the Shelby County Election Commission.

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The Election Commission picked the new system over hand-marked paper ballots preferred by a majority of the County Commission.

Commissioners Edmund Ford Jr. and Brandon Morrison were the only votes for the touch screen-paper readout proposal. Commissioners Mark Billingsley, Amber Mills and Mick Wright — all Republicans — did not vote on the matter. Republican David Bradford voted with the Democratic majority.

Election Commission Chairman Brent Taylor has pushed since last October for an up-or-down vote to get out of limbo the question of who gets to decide on picking the voting system.

The decision has been in “limbo,” Taylor said, since late 2020. Taylor had trouble getting a commissioner to sponsor the resolution until last week when Billingsley agreed to sponsor it.

“Your action today does not necessarily mean we will be voting in the 2022 elections with hand-marked paper ballots,” Taylor said before the vote. “If this is turned down, it goes back to the Election Commission and we will assess what our options are.”

Commissioner Mick Wright said most of the constituents he’s talked to believe the action amounts to selecting one system over another, instead of the standoff it is between the elected County Commission and the appointed Election Commission over which body does the selecting.

“You have a job to do and so do we,” Wright said. “It just so happens that we are at crossways. For whatever reason, you (Election Commission) have chosen not to do what this body says.”

As committed as most county commissioners are to hand-marked paper ballots, Taylor said the Election Commission wants voting machines and does not want paper ballots.

He acknowledged supporters of paper ballots have dominated the comments most county commissioners have heard.

“I can tell you the calls you are receiving now will pale in comparison with the first election where they have to cast votes with hand-marked paper ballots,” Taylor said, adding the last time paper ballots were used in a local election was in 1958.

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Advocates of the system say it’s not the same as those old paper ballot systems since the ballots are scanned digitally and a record is kept of them, not like someone counting the ballots saying what is on the ballot.

Election commissioner Kendra Lee, who is a recent appointee to the body and wasn’t there when the group made its earlier decisions on the touch-screen contract, parted ways with Taylor.

She urged the County Commission to vote down the contract “for the sake of accountability and transparency” and to prompt a new round of bidding on the contract with the Election Commission making the decision.

“The current body should make the decision if the current body is going to have to live with the consensus,” she said of the Election Commission. “I get a chance to be a part of the process.”

Taylor said the Election Commission will evaluate its next steps now that the decision has been made by the County Commission. One of the options is a lawsuit in Chancery Court, which the Election Commission voted to authorize earlier this year.

The lawsuit may be more of a certainty with passage of a later resolution added to the agenda at the last minute Monday that directs the county administration’s purchasing department to take proposals to open a new bidding process from vendors.

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Outgoing chairman Eddie Jones, who sponsored the resolution, said the proposal could be in hand by the end of September.

And Jones believes the County Commission doesn’t have to leave the selection of a new voting system to the Election Commission.

The vote to take new bids and go around the Election Commission’s decision was approved on an 8-2-1 vote with Billingsley and Ford voting no. Morrison abstained. Mills and Bradford did not vote.