At the State and Federal General Election this week, Tennessee voters can cast a ballot for or against four proposed amendments to the Tennessee Constitution.
Those four proposed amendments will appear on the November 8 ballot directly after candidates for governor and will be presented as yes or no questions. A yes vote is to vote to amend the constitution and a no vote will mean that you do no wish to amend the constitution and would rather keep the current language in the constitution unchanged.
The first amendment is relative to the right to work. This amendment would be added to the Constitution and state: it’s illegal for any person, corporation, association, or the State of Tennessee or its political subdivisions, to deny or attempt to deny employment to any person because of any affiliation with the labor union or employee organization. The second is relative to succession to the Governor in the event of disability. The third is to change language in the constitution, stating slavery and involuntary servitude are forever prohibited and nothing shall prohibit an inmate from working even if convicted of a crime. The fourth is to delete language stating ministries and priests of any denomination are prohibited from holding a seat in the House of the legislature.
In order for the amendment to pass and become a part of the constitution, two things must happen. The first, is the amendment must get more yes votes than no votes, and the second, is that the number of yes votes must be a majority of the total votes in the gubernatorial election. To determine the number of votes needed to adopt a proposed Constitutional amendment, votes for all candidates for governor are added together and then divided by two. If there are more yes votes than no votes on the proposed amendment and the number of yes votes exceeds 50% +1 of the total votes for governor, the amendment passes and becomes part of the Constitution. The Constitutional amendment fails if the number of yes votes does not meet or exceed the threshold, or if there are more no votes than yes votes.
If you’d like to see the exact language that will appear on the ballot, which includes summaries for each amendment, go to sos.tn.gov/amendments.
