On September 7th, Rep. John Ragan Will Ask The State Primary Board To Set Aside The Recent Primary Election For District 33 Due To The Participation Of Ineligible Voters.
Image Credit: JohnRagan4TN / Facebook
By Jennifer Hay [Special to The Tennessee Conservative] –
On Thursday, August 1, Rep. John Ragan lost his bid to continue representing Tennessee House District 33 by 258 votes to primary challenger Rick Scarbrough. Ragan has formally challenged this election outcome, because he believes that more than 1100 people cast votes who were not eligible to participate in a Republican primary.
Ragan’s challenge will be heard by the State Primary Board on September 7th at 2:30 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn Hotel in Mount Juliet, Tennessee (1975 Providence Parkway, 37122). Both Ragan and Scarbrough will have time to make their respective cases before the Board. The hearing will be open to the public and will include time for public comments. Those wishing to make a public comment must email Ginger Morrow by 2:30 p.m. on September 5th (ginger@tngop.com).
The hearing will conclude with a vote by the Board on the disposition of Ragan’s challenge. According to the chairman, Scott Golden, the board has the authority to uphold the election, overturn it, or make “any other solution the Board sees fit to deem that is legally allowed by law.”
Ragan stated his position succinctly in a recent email to the Board: “In summary, the evidence inarguably establishes that over eleven hundred voters who do not meet the published TRP definition of bona fide Republicans illegally voted in the contested election. The only reasonable course of action in accordance with the rule of law is to set aside the election and use an alternate method of candidate selection.”
This would not be the first time a primary election has been overturned in Tennessee. In 2008, a State Primary Board for the Democratic party stripped Sen. Rosalind Kurita of her party’s nomination due to crossover voting; they awarded her opponent, Tim Barnes, instead. Kurita sued, but the decision was upheld.
Ragan has the support of Myra Mansfield, the chairwoman of the Anderson County Republican Party. She believes that Anderson County “suffered a calculated and planned attack in the Republican process by Democrats.” Mansfield is urging concerned citizens from all of Tennessee to sign a petition supporting John Ragan.
This journalist received a copy of an email conversation between Ragan and Kenneth Meyer, a member of the State Primary Board. Meyer raised concerns about disenfranchising voters, writing “The thought of overturning duly certified election results, thus disenfranchising thousands of Tennessee voters who have made their selection clear, is abhorrent to me.”
To this objection, Ragan responded, “I maintain that over a thousand illegal voters, a significant number of which are hugely suspect, have disenfranchised all of those who are bona fide Republicans.”
Meyer also stated: “On the primary claim of 1135 ‘illegal’ votes cast in your election, this is a very serious charge, and you are relying on TCA 2-7-115 to support your argument. As I have already pointed out, this code section clearly requires a criminal investigation before any other step can be taken.”
To answer Meyer’s demand for a criminal investigation, Ragan drew a sports analogy: “Last year, the TSSAA ordered a high school to forfeit all their football wins from the 2023 season for playing an ineligible student… The TSSAA, as the governing body, did not wait for a criminal investigation to be concluded but acted upon the best information available. As this case illustrates there is no requirement for a criminal investigation before the governing body takes action.”
Ragan continued, “Individual criminal prosecution is not the recourse I seek. My goal is free, legal and fair elections.”
To make his election challenge, Ragan invoked Tennessee law, Republican-party bylaws, and public voter rolls.
Tennessee law specifies that a primary voter must be “a bona fide member of and affiliated with the political party in whose primary the voter seeks to vote (T.C.A. § 2-7-115).” However, Tennessee law defers to political parties to determine their own requirements for membership.
The bylaws of the Tennessee Republican Party, recently approved by the State Executive Committee in April, 2024, define a bona fide Republican as one who has voted in at least three (3) of the four (4) most recent statewide Republican primary elections in which he is eligible to vote (Article IX, Section 1).”
The definition for bona fide Republican set forth in Article IX may have been intended to specify who could run for public office as a Republican. However, the term is used elsewhere in the bylaws to refer to voters, and no other definition is proffered. For example, “only bona fide Republican voters from within those districts may nominate candidates for offices in said district (Rule H, Section 5).”
To prove the participation of ineligible voters, Ragan pulled the voting histories of everyone who voted in the August 1st Republican primary for District 33. This is public information. A person’s voting history does not reveal who a person voted for, but it does reveal whether a person voted at all and in what primary (Democrat or Republican).
By his analysis of public voting rolls, Ragan found that 617 voters—more than twice the margin of his loss—had not voted in any of the four most recent Republican primaries. Of these, 276 had voted in Democratic primaries in at least two of the last four opportunities. Ragan found that 1119 voters did not meet the current definition of bona fide Republican, because they had only voted once in the last four Republican primaries.
In an email to this journalist, Ragan explained, “Tennessee has open primaries with no advance party registration required. This situation is in opposition to closed primaries in other states wherein a voter has to register as a party member well in advance of voting in their party’s primary.”
“The obvious answer is simple,” Ragan wrote. “The General Assembly can close the primaries.”
This journalist reached out to Rick Scarbrough’s campaign on August 29th to understand their position but received no response.
About the Author: Jennifer Hay is a Catholic mother of six who is on a mission to expose the whole truth of Knoxville’s Planned Parenthood arson.
2 Responses
Many supposed Repubs in the TN Legislature are RINOs who want the Dem votes.
My guess is that Rick Scarbrough is a RINO.
The TN GOP should stop allowing this – it devalues the Republican “brand”.
In my County there is actually a Leftist who ran as a Republican and the TN GOP certified him because he was “bonafide”.
It’s easy to pay $35 and in many counties the Dems ONLY vote in the Repub primaries. They are playing the TN GOP. No respect.
If we want to stop Democrats from voting in Republican primaries we have to make our open primaries the third rail of Tennessee politics by supporting candidates in the Republican primary who oppose those officeholders failing to vote to close the primaries. May I suggest that we all start saving now so that by August 2026 we will have the money to do so.