Oconee County Commissioners Get Their Jobs With Support Of Small Numbers Of County Voters

Chuck Horton needed only 1,922 votes to win the runoff for the special election to fill Post 2 on the Oconee County Board of Commissioners on Dec. 6.

That’s because only 3,846 of the county’s 24,657 registered voters, or 15.6 percent, cast a ballot in the runoff, according to the certified results filed on Dec. 9 by the Oconee County Board of Elections and Registration.

Three of those persons left the ballot blank or cast a write-in vote, meaning that the winner needed one more than half of 3,843, or the 1,922 votes, to win.

The official count filed on Dec. 9 gave Horton one more vote than the preliminary results released at the end of the evening on Dec. 6, and he ended up with 2,182 votes, or 56.8 percent of the total.

An analysis of turnout and votes at the precinct level shows that turnout played a deciding role in the Dec. 6 election outcome in several interrelated ways, some unique to this election and some consistent with elections in the past.

For more on this story, please go to Oconee County Observations.