are selected by the General Assembly in joint session, where each member of the General Assembly is accorded a single vote. Each office is awarded to the first candidate to receive a majority of the votes (67 of 132). The General Assembly selects the seven members of the State Election Commission. It selects four members from the majority party (the one controlling the majority of the 132 total seats) and three members from the minority party. Gubernatorial election dispute A contested gubernatorial election is supposed to be decided by a joint session of the General Assembly, according to statutory law. The General Assembly is also required to decide the result of the gubernatorial election by joint session according to the state constitution in the event of an exact tie in the popular vote, an extremely unlikely election result. Amending the State Constitution The General Assembly can propose amendments to the state constitution, but only through one of the two available time-consuming processes: Legislative initiative For the legislature to propose amendments to the state constitution directly, an amendment must first be passed by an absolute majority of the membership of each house during one term of the Assembly. Then, during the next General Assembly term, each house must pass the amendment again, this time by a two-thirds majority. The amendment must then be put on the statewide ballot, but only at a time when an election for governor is also being held. The amendment to be passed must receive over half of the total votes cast in the gubernatorial election in order to be ratified and come into effect. The 1870 constitution of Tennessee had never been amended in this manner until 1998, when the "Victims' Rights Amendment" was added. A similar process was used in 2002 to enact the state lottery. Two amendments proposed by the General Assembly were presented to voters on the 2006 ballot. In 2005 the "Tennessee Marriage Protection Amendment," specifying that only marriages between a man and a woman could be legally recognized in the state, was approved for submission to the voters in 2006. The ACLU had previously challenged the validity of the amendment by asserting that a constitutional obligation to publicly advertise the amendment had not been satisfied. However, on February 23, 2006, Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle ruled that the proposed amendment would be on the ballot in 2006. Both that amendment