From the Shelby County Election Commission’s operations center at Shelby Farms around 4 p.m. on the city’s Thursday, Oct. 5, Election Day, Linda Phillips began noticing more help-desk calls from the city’s 98 precincts.

With about three hours left to vote, elections administrator Phillips saw the telltale signs that turned out to be a mild surge in turnout.

On The Ballot: Memphis election recap, results and runoffs

“I think Memphians decided to come out and that’s great,” she said Thursday afternoon. “In this particular race, I think a lot of people didn’t make up their mind until late in the process. I voted very late. I normally vote on the first day.”

As it turns out, most of the city’s 373,091 voters didn’t make up their minds. Only 23.7% — or 88,668 — did. That’s about a sold-out Liberty Bowl and sold-out FedExForum combined.

The Memphis election and its aftermath are the topics on a reporter's roundtable edition of WKNO-TV’s “Behind The Headlines.”

The discussion includes Toby Sells of The Memphis Flyer.

The city’s low voter turnout is a problem. A majority of Memphis voters haven’t shown up for a city election in 32 years.

But a low turnout and/or the lack of a visible mandate by vote count doesn’t stop candidates from winning and losing. It doesn’t prevent decisions from being made.

And the decisions being made are seldom in one political direction.

Any election triumph is short-lived because the transition to governing comes quickly – sometimes before the first vote is cast if your pollsters are good enough.

Much was made before early voting of the possibility that whoever won the mayor’s race would win with 25,000 votes.

Paul Young’s winning vote total by the unofficial results was 24,408 — the lowest total by a winner of the Memphis mayor’s race since the start of the mayor-council form of government in 1967.

The previous low mark was the 41,829 votes Jim Strickland posted in his 2015 upset of incumbent A C Wharton.

Council member JB Smiley talked of getting more votes than the winner of the mayor’s race and claiming his own political mandate based on that.

Smiley ran unopposed for reelection and did social media and television ads toward that end.

And he got more votes than Young — 33,607. But so did council member Chase Carlisle, who had opposition. Carlisle got 29,091 votes. Council member-elect Janika White earned 26,234. And super district council member Ford Canale finished with 26,719.

Jeff Warren, the other unopposed council member on Thursday’s ballot, got more votes than Smiley — 36,538.

Mayoral candidates react to defeat

Whose mandate should be followed?

Before the current council leaves office at the end of this year, the group has some unfinished business — a proposal by council chairman Martavius Jones to put a charter amendment to voters that would allow partisan primaries in city elections.

Smiley has an amendment to change that from primaries to bringing back the city’s runoff requirement for the mayor’s and all council races.

Warren has said he can live with the runoff provision going to voters. But he is opposed to partisan primaries.

If either version makes it onto the August 2024 ballot, it would join four other charter amendments referendums:

• Requiring candidates for mayor and city council to have lived in the city for at least two years prior to Election Day.
• A multi-part ballot question of gun control measures to apply within the City of Memphis that would set aside the state’s open carry-no permit gun law and ban assault weapons within the city.
• Requiring Memphis Light, Gas and Water employees to live within Shelby County after the MLGW board did away with a county residency requirement.
• Restore the city court clerk as an elected office starting with a special election in 2024 to a partial two-year term beginning in 2025.

The next frontier in the city’s discussion about how voters make decisions and which decisions they make will look familiar: No field of 17 candidates but maybe some yard signs and stickers when three council seats head for runoff elections Nov. 16.