Democratic Legislative Candidates Agree On Issues Raised In Forum

The three Democratic candidates seeking to represent Oconee County in the General Assembly in January gave mostly similar answers to a wide range of questions, from the impact of redistricting on the county to the COVID-19 pandemic, in a virtual candidate forum on Monday night.

The three Republican incumbents chose not to participate in the citizen-organized forum, so only Democratic candidates, Mokah Johnson for House District 117, Jonathan Wallace for House District 119, and Zachary Perry for Senate District 46, were in the session.

The virtual forum was marred by ugly racial slurs hurled at Johnson by Zoom Bombers before they could be tossed out of the session.

In her closing comments, Johnson addressed the incident, asking voters to “look beyond my skin color” and “beyond my hair” and vote for her because of the work she has done as an activist in the community.

During the 90-minute-long session on Monday, Johnson, Wallace and Perry responded to 13 questions submitted by voters asking for their positions on a gambling, transportation, partisan elections, ranked voting and other topics, as well as on the pandemic and redistricting.

Early voting for the Nov. 3 election is in its second week, and 8,715 Oconee County voters already have cast a ballot in-person, and another 4,134 have returned an absentee ballot. Those 12,849 voters who already have marked their ballots make up 40.7 percent of the county’s 31,594 eligible voters.

For more on this story, with a video of the virtual candidate forum, please go to Oconee County Observations.