Tennessee Secretary of State

The Tennessee Secretary of State is an office created by the Tennessee State Constitution. The Secretary of State is responsible for many of the administrative aspects of the operation of state government of Tennessee. The current Secretary of State is Tre Hargett.

According to the Tennessee Constitution of 1870, the Secretary of State is to be elected to a four-year term by the General Assembly in a joint convention. "Joint convention" means that the 99 state Representatives and 33 state Senators sit as a single body and cast individual votes. A majority of the 132 votes (67) is thus required for election. As this office is elected on a partisan basis, this means that the party having an overall majority of members in the two houses will elect its nominee secretary of state. Since Reconstruction, in Tennessee this invariably resulted in the secretary of state being a Democrat until 2009, when the Republicans had the majority of seats in the General Assembly. The election of the secretary of state occurs in the cycle opposite to that of the election of the governor of Tennessee; in other words the term of the Tennessee Secretary of State is roughly coincident with that of the President of the United States, generally beginning and ending only a few days earlier.

Tennessee's method of selection stands in contrast to that of nearly all other U.S. states, where the secretary of state is generally either popularly elected on a statewide basis or appointed by the Governor of the state. In contrast to the practice of some states, in Tennessee the secretary of state is not high in the order of succession to the governorship; the speakers of the Senate and House are the first two in line.

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