(mid tempo music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(mid tempo music) - Good evening, and welcome to "Interact" WCTE's newest public affairs show.

I'm your host and moderator Michelle Price.

And over the next several months, we're gonna be talking to local community leaders and influencers about items and different topics that are important to the residents of the upper Cumberland and Central Tennessee.

Today I'm joined by Dwight Henry, who has had an esteemed career.

Dwight has served in state legislator.

He has been a city councilman for the City of Cookeville and has served as the Cookeville City mayor.

Dr. Geeta McMillan, is the treasurer for the Cookeville Putnam County branch of the NAACP, and chairs their diversity committee.

And Drew McMillan is the Jackson County Election Administrator, and he is one of the newest certified election administrators in the state of Tennessee.

We just had a primary in Putnam County, and only 12% of the registered voters turned out and voted.

So what do we do to get more people to vote?

- Wow, that's the magic question, isn't it?

- It is and I'm really one of the fortunate ones because my involvement in the political process started actually with my grandfather.

I mean, I grew up hearing you vote, you vote every time you vote, you vote.

That was embedded into my thinking as a six year old boy, really, it was to the point, Michelle, where if you didn't vote, the voting police showed up and just kinda hauled you off.

And you served until the next election and see if you voted that time, but it matters.

It matters who serves on those school boards.

It matters who serves as county commissioners.

It matters city council, it matters legislature.

It matters Congress, Senate, all, it matters.

And we need to know something about those people, what their core values are, what they believe, what they think about the future of our community should be the future of our education system.

So it's impacting our life and the very best way that we can impact it back is to get out there and vote.

And to say that, and by even even broader scope than that representative democracy, which is what we have, I mean, in pure democracy, everybody votes on everything, in a representative democracy, we elect representatives at the local state and federal level to vote for us.

And if the larger and larger percentage of people don't vote representative democracy over time becomes something else, a form of government that's not as pure and not as good.

And doesn't serve the people as well.

Closed elections where people end up being elected.

I don't know if I have time.

I'm thinking just a few feet from here something years ago.

Joan Tansil you may remember her.

- Yes.

- Joan Tansil's husband did that right side and outside of this courthouse.

On election day, she was running for city council and really by and large, the public really didn't know who she was at that point in time, five people would be elected.

He held a sign up that said vote for Joan Tansil for city council, about five or six people drove by and said, when's the election?

He said today.

And so they went to vote, Joan Tansil gets on the city council by three votes, by three votes, she gets on the council, did a great job.

I served with her.

She ran again, she was elected vice mayor and did a wonderful job serving our community by three votes.

So every vote really, really does matter.

And everybody should participate that can.

- The thing that I find very difficult to get across to people is exactly what Dwight said exactly.

Every vote counts.

And it sounds so cliche-ish.

My vote, I'm one of 10,000, one of whatever, but it is so important that people really believe that.

But I think it's almost become, like I said a cliche that people don't understand.

Yes I know you'd rather sit down and eat your pork chop instead of going to vote, but it is, it is incredibly important that everyone understand the power of one vote.

- We just had a census down in Jackson County, they do it every 10 years or so, comparing that with how many registered voters we have.

We only have 72% of our citizens that are registered to vote.

So, almost 30% can't vote, even if they wanted to, 'cause they're not registered.

We really need to up that number.

- Why do you think that?

That's amazing.

I don't think that's unusual for, I don't know about the statistics for the Upper Cumberland, but I would imagine that's fairly typical and I find I'm going, why?

- Right, and out of those 72% that we have only 55 to 65 usually show out to vote.

- You mentioned, I served in the legislature.

The year I ran for the state representative, 16,000 people voted and I won by 88 votes.

- Oh my.

- And had 44 people gone the other way I wouldn't have got to serve.

I mean, it was that close, but what happens over time is that again, if something is having an influence on me, on what I pay for things, how much my taxes are, what I can build and can't build on my property, the quality of education my children are getting, I want to decide who's gonna push those buttons and who's gonna make those decisions.

And all I have to do to get my two cents worth in is to vote, and that matters.

And I'm at a loss after of decades of following this why more people don't realize that and don't get involved.

But hopefully through shows like these, we can stimulate them to think about how much their vote does matter in terms of not only their individual future and future of their family, but their community in which they live.

- Makes me wonder how do we get more younger people registered to vote and participating in the whole process?

- Well, I know most administrators and we just went on May 3rd, we went over to the high school and made an announcement over the intercom.

Anyone that's 18 or older or will be by August 4th to come up, and we registered about 40 kids that day.

- I'm a little proud of Monterey High School.

It's one of our smallest high schools in the county, if not the smallest, they did that same thing, answering a challenge that Trey Hargett had issued through the state and Monterey High School registered 100% of the eligible voters.

So.

- Wow, that's amazing.

- That is amazing.

- That is amazing.

- And you know, something else Michelle about that is, and when you're speaking to parents a little bit here, my daughters grew up in an environment where I, because I was taught that women, I said, you're gonna vote.

I said you just vote.

Well, they both vote all the time.

I mean, they don't, I doubt that.

And some of 'em go, but they may not have lived where they registered the absentee ballots, or whatever it takes, they don't always vote the way I want 'em to, but they vote, they participate in the process and that's what matters.

So parents encourage your children as they're growing up, hey, it matters that you do this.

And just like we teach them to brush their teeth and take care of themselves teach 'em to participate in the political process and I think that will help some.

- One of the things too, that I have found not only with young people, is that sometimes even though they, most 18 year olds think they know everything, they're adults, I love that, they're adults, but that some of them feel unsure or maybe not confident about the process in a couple of ways.

And one of the things that we found, because I know all of Tennessee's elections and election machinery, election process, each county has something different, is making sure they understand that it's not that hard to do.

And that folks are there to help 'em like if you have a machine and you walk in, you have folks that can say, okay, now this is what you're gonna do.

You turn this button to get to blah, blah, blah.

And you push this button, but they feel a little unsure about the process.

And so I think that one of the things that's gonna be, not only with the young people, but with my experience with folks in the nursing home is literally showing them how it works.

Our lecture administrator had a, I guess you call it a mock machine, if you will, where they could actually turn it and push it or whatever, whatever.

And I think that's another key.

I don't think there's one simple answer on why people don't some of it's my vote doesn't count.

Some of it is, it doesn't matter, the government's gonna do whatever they wanna do or whatever things of those natures.

But I think one of the things that we have to address, because we can, is the educational process.

- Do you see a lack of diversity?

Do you have like certain areas of your county, say, where the voters aren't representative of the population?

- Due to the new census that we had to do, the state also requires each county to do redistricting, which I know Putnam County's went through that as well as Jackson County.

But in Jackson county, we added a new precinct.

It's called the Union Hill Voting District.

And that's gonna keep, as you know we've had a lot of people moving into this area.

And most people from outta state are wanting to be closer to Cookeville.

With the way houses are they come to Jackson County, prices are a little cheaper, they can afford that.

So they get in Jackson County, but closer to Cookeville.

So we've had a lot of influx of people.

With that being said, we've had to move some things around and with our redistricting, we opened that new precinct.

That way people would, might only have to drive five minutes to vote instead of across the county, 20, 25 minutes.

- Okay.

Is there any way that the counties can look at the demographics of who is registered to vote to ensure, if you have a shortage in, 20 to 30 year olds that are voting, that you need to recruit them or to sign those up.

- I know you can go to, there's an app called Go Vote TN, you can go to that and you can look up, I can look myself up, I could look up Mr. Dwight or anybody and see where he's registered to vote, what precinct he needs to go to and everything like that.

But as in a demographic of these people are 20 to 30 years old in Jackson County, I don't know of any place to look at that.

The only thing that we can do really is to look at our numbers.

We have 100 people that voted at Jackson County High School compared to 300 out at Union Rich.

Then we might have to, that's a pretty big difference.

We might have to do something different when it comes to 200 voters.

- So after the election, you can do proactive things to increase the participation for the next election.

- Correct, after we look at the data.

- What about diversity in the candidates?

I know in Putnam County, during the primary, it was a little disconcerting to a lot of voters because there was only one Democrat on the ballot and he was running for a county commission seat in the fifth district.

So when a lot of voters went to the other 11 districts and asked for the Democratic ballot, there was no one on it.

And a couple of our other counties, Cumberland is the next largest county.

They only had two Democrats on the ballot.

What can we do to increase diversity among candidates?

- Here, I'll kind of respond to that.

Regardless of if, and we're sitting here representing two different political parties and third we're friends, and I think we, let me just say that, many times when I sit on the city council, we would have real intense conversation over and it would be a three, two vote.

We had five of us on the council, but always, I always try to, and the other guys did too, regardless of the position we took, we turned around and shook hands and said, hey, it's just business.

You saw it one way, I saw it another way.

Sometimes I came out on the short end of the vote, sometimes the long end, but I think that's, we don't need to take it personally because we have different political views.

Competition makes it good.

But regardless of which political party that I'm affiliated with, be it Republican, Democrat, whatever it happens to be, and the lay of the land, the political landscape was different when I got here in the 1970s in terms of the parties that tended to dominate the election.

But if I'm affiliated with a party that maybe I feel like is losing influence or losing impact, or having more problems getting people to run with my label, with that party's label beside them, then I've gotta do two things.

I've gotta say, okay, is it the messaging?

Are we not doing a good job of getting out who we are, what we're about, how we see the future of this community?

Are we not doing a good enough job articulating that and making sure the public understands that, is it a messaging problem?

Or could it be that we lost touch?

Have we lost touch on some things that matter to the public?

So if I'm doing that, and I think my party's losing influence, I think as a leader in that party, I've gotta deal with those two things.

Are we getting our correct message out and have we come away from the way the majority thinks on critical issues?

So I think those things are always gonna be important regardless of the party you're associated with.

- That plays a lot into some research I did after the 2020 election.

One of the things that we noticed looking at the demographics between 2008 and 2020, the Upper Cumberland went drastically redder, and Jackson County, for example, Jackson County was one of the top eight counties in the country for their shift in voters, from Democratic to Republican.

Is that possibly because of the belief shift or could it be something else?

- You know, I think it could be both.

Let me say one thing.

And we all know this, that we are inundated.

It's not 24 hour news, it feels like it's every second, - 24 seconds.

- 24 seconds, but you've got Facebook, you've got Twitter.

You've got, I don't know what, all the things plus back in the day, you had your Nashville news stations and you might have had CNN or whatever they are.

But I think that so many of our folks are inundated by almost, I hate to say this, but almost information overload.

And I get the feeling there's some mistrust on both sides of Democrat, or Republican on who's saying what and what it says, because there's no more Walter Cronkites out there.

I mean, you and I know that when we grew up, we watched the news and we felt like we were getting the truth and I assume we were, but then now I'm getting MSNBC saying this and Fox News is saying this and blah, blah, blah saying this and national politics really has a lot more local impact than it used to.

We used to have the Washington DC bunch.

And then we had the Putnam County commissioners, they were pretty separate.

I mean, as far as political type of things, I'm talking about being red or blue.

And I think that more and more, because we have this impact from this inundation.

I mean, I'll just, inundation of almost too much stuff that we don't have, I don't feel as, it's just like, I would vote for this young man in a heartbeat and it's not because he's a Republican or Democrat.

I know he's a man of character.

And I think sometimes we wanna paint things.

Okay, I'm gonna paint you red and I'll paint you blue, so, oh, geez, I'm red, so, or whatever.

It's not that this man is a man of character.

And I think that we've lost that somewhat on the local level.

And I'll be honest with you.

I think that a lot of folks were disheartened because now it's the school board that, because the state legislators decided that they needed to be partisan.

- First of all, I wanna say thank you to Geeta because I haven't been called young in a long time.

(Geeta laughs) But I would agree also that, and I will date myself.

I remember the days we had three television stations, all of whom signed off at midnight and we got the test pattern until about five o'clock in the morning.

We didn't get the news till six o'clock at night.

Then we got it at 10 or 11 depending on what part of the state we lived in.

And we felt like that it was pretty objective.

We felt like here's what's happening, Walter Cronkite saying, "And that's the way it is."

And he would end every newscast that way.

And we'd say that's the way it is all right.

And we'd all, but now whether you watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC, you get the feeling and you really know that there's a narrative there.

There's a narrative, and pretty much know what that narrative is gonna be as you go down the dial and you get it 24/7.

And it's not like you are really feeling like you're getting objective news in many places anymore, which does cause confusion, which does cause people to say, well, what's it matter anyway, I don't want anything to do with that process.

And I think it goes against this pro-voting thing that we're talking about.

I really, I couldn't agree more.

I think that's part of the culture that we live in, that's unfortunate to a degree.

- And it makes you wonder if the primaries are really dividing us.

And if we would be better off going back to, like Jackson County does and doing away with the primaries and only having the general election where party really doesn't come into it.

It's more the person.

- I think finding a way to come together is critical.

Now, of course, I agree with you totally.

I think what Jackson County, you didn't know you were gonna get around the whole.

(everyone laughs) Because the more we divide, the more we divide and the more we polarize each other and it, let me tell you something, there's not a bad person on our county commission, Republican or Democrat, but we wanna make 'em that way.

And anyway, that's my pet peeve.

No, they're not the enemy.

It's like you said, what were you saying, about you shook hands and said it's business.

- Yeah, it's just business, just business.

- Doing the best we can.

- It's just doing, seeing something in a different point of view.

And you know, I would jump in here referring to my days on the city council.

We don't need every vote to be 5-0, if every vote's 5-0 somebody's not thinking, somebody doesn't have their own ideas.

We need some three, two votes.

We need some disagreements.

Our founding fathers disagreed all the time.

- All the time.

- But in over time and hopefully the betterment of the whole happens.

So yeah, we need that debate, we need that discussion.

We need that competition, but we don't need to down each other as people.

It's about ideas and ideas about government.

And whatever side wins out on a particular issue, we need to shake hands and say, well, maybe I'll win next time, but I value you as a human being.

And I think, well, I think in our country, we've gotten away from that in the last few years, I really do to a great degree.

- That falls into a lot of what Geeta and I were talking about, about why it's so hard to get people to run for office.

To run for office now, you might as well open the closet door and just, let somebody see what you did all the way back to kindergarten.

And it's not just the elected official or the candidate's secrets.

I mean, the families are attacked.

- [Drew] Exactly.

- I know I've been part of some candidate recruitment and it is extremely difficult because you have to have somebody with a Dwight Henry mindset that's willing to, I don't wanna say put your life on hold, but basically 'cause I mean, it's a huge commitment to be a representative for this entire city.

It's huge.

And it takes an unusual person to do that.

And then what you said, Michelle, is that, are you opening your family to criticism or whatever, it's a big deal.

And that's one thing.

And I think because we have this 24/7 thing and I can text all of you guys and in three seconds, tell you that Martha Sue's husband, Billy Ray did a terrible time or did something terrible.

Or, you know what I'm saying.

It's almost we have too much connection and it may not be true either.

- Yeah, agree.

If somebody had asked me when I was running for public office, did you really get nine paddlings when you were in the fourth grade?

I would've had to say, yeah, I did.

(everyone laughs) I really did.

And something else that, as far as people running, one thing that I learned over time that when the large crowd shows up at your city council meeting, large crowd, they're not usually there to tell you how good of a job you're doing.

- [Michelle] That's true.

- They're usually there 'cause they're angry about something.

And I would say for folks who are in the process, voting, for those who are serving and I'm not serving so I can say this, if you think they're doing a good job, find a way to tell 'em, text, email, whatever, hey, appreciate the way you voted on that.

Appreciate you're doing a good job.

Because they're human beings too.

And they get more of the grief and more the negative feedback than positive.

So find a way to let them know you appreciate their public service.

- Right, right, I like that, - That's good point.

- How do we establish civil discourse and respect with the differing opinions in our own community and in political conversation?

- Like you said earlier, at the end of the day, we're all human beings.

We have to treat each other with the same respect, the same dignity that we will be treated as ourselves.

It don't matter if you're from the right, from the left, from the middle, it doesn't matter.

You need to treat everyone as you would like to be treated.

I think it all comes down to that.

- That sounds like the golden rule.

- Oh yeah, it does, doesn't it?

You know, I think, you alluded to your grandfather in telling vote, vote, vote.

I think that that statement leads into what I consider one of the critical things.

If you have your, I think the family is really important because if your children at an early age are taught to say exactly what Drew said, treat each other with respect, then that's so critical.

'Cause, and it's not an easy task.

We're all so busy, especially young families, but the schools, the parents, the Sunday school teachers, wherever you have a chance, maybe we should all be interventionist.

If you hear somebody saying something, you go, well, wait, let's think about that.

I mean as adults, but I think that training, hopefully that we can encourage folks to have civil discourses with children and have the give and take, and hopefully that'll transfer as adults.

But I do, I mean, the good news is like I said, Dwight said this many times, we've known each other a long time and we disagree on a lot of things, but you know what?

We just go, okay, Dwight, it's alright.

We can have a civil discourse.

- Yeah.

- And I think that that's something that's almost a learned behavior.

- If Geeta feels passionately about an issue one way and I feel passionate another way, it's very easy to let emotions get caught up in that.

And what we have to remember is words are containers, words contain things.

And when words get out there, even though you might apologize later, they're still out there.

- They're still out there.

- And we've got to remember that this is the issue of the day.

I mean, there's gonna be another issue tomorrow and next week.

And they're not really gonna wanna say something that could burn a bridge with my relationship with Geeta or someone else over the issue of the day.

And I have to learn and I'm learning that just because I think something, I don't have to say it.

And I've gotta be careful with my words because words either can build up or they can tear down.

That doesn't mean I compromise my values.

That doesn't mean I don't speak my piece on a particular issue.

I realize the humanity in the person I'm dealing with and I don't wanna destroy a 30 year friendship over some issue that I'm gonna forget what it is in six months, probably.

- You realize that you're saying 30 years, it's been closer to 50.

- Oh god, has it really?

- Yes it has.

- We met in kindergarten.

- No, no, no.

But I'm telling you Drew hit the nail on the head.

- That's the thing I think too.

Everyone's, if you ask us all the same question, we're all three, probably gonna have different opinions.

- Yeah.

- But at the end of the day we could come and probably find an agreement in there somewhere that, hey, you're right, I'm right, you're right as well.

But we just all look at it different ways.

- And that's important.

It's important to surround yourself with people with different views.

Not everybody that thinks the same thing, because then how can you learn and grow?

- Mm hmm, that's right.

- Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of "Interact".

Thank you to our guests, Dwight Henry, Dr. Geeta McMillan and Drew McMillan.

We're going continue our conversation about voting and we hope you will too.

Join us next time.

- [Narrator] For more information about how you can continue this discussion, please visit wcte.org/interact.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music)