By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
NOV. 6, 2020 | Let’s look at significant results of the Gwinnett 2020 voting scene.
Gwinnett’s Transit Referendum is still somewhat in doubt. Incomplete returns on Thursday, the tally showed the “No” votes ahead by 1,749 votes. There were 196,326 “No” votes and 194,577 “Yes” votes.
However, about 5,400 votes are still not counted. County Communications Director Joe Sorenson said late Wednesday:
“In an effort to expedite the complete count of the remaining Gwinnett County General and Special Election votes, the County, with assistance from Dominion Voting Systems technicians, will revisit the batches of absentee by mail ballots that were added to the Election Night totals without being fully adjudicated. Once these ballots have been fully adjudicated, the absentee by mail totals will be updated, and together with the remaining uncounted votes, the results will be tallied and published. Additional uncounted votes include approximately 4,400 absentee ballots received on Election Day, votes to be rescanned from one corrupted data card from the Shorty Howell advance in-person voting site, and any of the approximately 1,000 provisional ballots that can be counted. The adjudication process is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. on Thursday, November 5 and is estimated to take about three days to complete.”
So, 5,400 last-minute-counted votes, more or less, will determine the Gwinnett transit vote. It is unlikely to affect any other races.
Meanwhile, note that the other local referendum on the 2020 ballot, the extension of the one cent sales tax for educational purposes, handily won, now at 76.56 percent, or 297,223 “Yes” votes to 91,013 “No” votes. School officials, as well as taxpayers, should be smiling at this relatively easy way to pay for school infrastructure because of our growth. Remember: out-of-town Gwinnett shoppers help pay part of our school construction costs.
Other winners: Perhaps the biggest statewide winner was Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in charge of our state’s elections, who had a relatively easy day. There were few problems reporting, and all of them relatively small. With so many people voting early, or by absentee, Election Day was far different from the plagued Primary Election, which had multiple problems. There were also few reports of long lines of people waiting to vote.
Another element: Perhaps it was that the 2020 election came during a COVID crisis, but we see the 2020 election season as helping to show that both Early Voting and mailed-in absentee voting can work. The hullabaloo of an election season, with many, many new voters in Georgia, all worked to cause people to ponder how would be the best way to vote. And so the uptick of early and absentee voters….made election day itself much less crowded.
The closest Gwinnett legislative race was in House District 102, where Democrat Gregg Kennard won by 733 votes over newcomer Republican Soo Hong.
The only other race with a margin of less than 1,000 votes showed Republican Chuck Efstration in House District 104, winning by 912 votes in what was viewed as a Democratic year.
In another relatively close race, Republican Mary Kay Murphy retained her School Board seat by 1,414 votes over Tanisha Banks.
Bourdeaux
And look at Carolyn Bourdeaux! After three years of campaigning, and just barely losing the 7th District Congressional seat in 2018, she was victorious against Dr. Rich McCormick. The totals combined from Gwinnett and Forsyth Counties showed Bourdeaux with 185,413 votes, to McCormick’s 176,816. That’s a margin of 8,597, so even the unreported votes still outstanding could not change this victory for her.
So that’s probably it, except, possibly, for the Transit Referendum outcome. We may not know until Monday.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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