Early Voting Ends With Fewer Than 5,000 Casting Ballots

A total of 4,798 voters cast ballots in early voting that ended Friday for the special elections for Georgia House District 117 and Georgia House District 119.

House District 117, which includes parts of Barrow, Clarke, Jackson and Oconee counties, had 2,165 voters, while House District 119, split equally between Clarke and Oconee counties, had 2,633 votes cast.

The lower figures for House District 117 reflect very low turnout in Barrow and Jackson counties, which make up 9.1 percent and 11.3 percent of the registered voters in the district respectively.

Turnout prior to regular voting on Nov. 7 reflects only 5.7 percent of the 38,057 active and inactive voters in the 117th and 7.0 percent of the 37,438 active and inactive voters in the 119th, meaning that many more voters yet could participate in the elections.

If the Dec. 6, 2016, special runoff election for an Oconee County Board of Commissioners post serves as a guide, the votes cast in early voting would represent about 40 percent of those eventually cast.

Only one race was on that Dec. 6, 2016, ballot, similar to what is true in almost all of Oconee County for the Tuesday special election.

That would mean that the final vote tally will be about 5,200 in the 117th and about 6,330 in the 119th.

If these rough guesses are correct, Republican Houston Gaines or Democrat Deborah Gonzalez will need only a little more than 2,600 votes to win in the 117th.

The top vote getter among Tom Lord, Steven Strickland, Jonathan Wallace and Marcus Wiedower in the 119th could have as few as about 1,600 votes.

Lord, Strickland and Wiedower are Republicans, while Wallace is a Democrat. Unless one of the four gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two will meet in a runoff on Dec. 5.

For more on this story, go toOconee County Observations.