Tennesseans apparently have lost their right to medical privacy.
First Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, demanded and received the unredacted medical records of Tennesseans who got gender-affirming care at Vanderbilt. Then he announced his plans to demand Tennesseans’ medical records from other states if he suspects they received a legal abortion there.
This AG is seriously violating our freedom. What’s worse, we didn’t even elect him. Tennessee is one of just seven states whose AG is appointed, not chosen by the voters.
Between structural differences like that and differences in voting laws, some Americans enjoy a far more responsive, representative state government than others. In 2022, Dr. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, gave each state a “democracy” score based on multiple variables. Guess which state came in last.
Here are some of the reasons Tennessee is the least democratic—with a small D—state.
Tennessee has only one elected statewide office: governor.
Tennessee is extremely gerrymandered.
Tennessee doesn’t have citizen-led ballot initiatives. We can’t gather signatures on a petition to put, say, abortion protections on the ballot. That has to go through the state legislature. So, yeah.
It’s harder to register and vote in Tennessee than in most other states. And in Tennessee, unlike most states, if you’re convicted of a felony, you lose your right to vote even after you’ve served your time, and it’s either impossible or very expensive to get it back. Around 470,000 Tennesseans can’t vote for that reason.
Most of these problems aren’t structural; they’re political. They can be changed if we get Democrats back in power.
Since 2010, when Republicans won a supermajority in Tennessee’s government, they’ve used gerrymandering and voter suppression to stay in power. They’ve been getting less democratic—and more extreme—ever since. The only tool we have now to reverse that trend is to vote, and to get lots of nonvoters to vote.
It’s no coincidence that since Republicans have been in power, Tennessee has dropped to last for voter turnout. The good news? There are lots of nonvoters to get. Let’s go get them.
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