By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JULY 1, 2025 | Let’s take a look at two recent unrelated elections from June 2025.
Last week there was an election in Georgia for two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC). This election should have been held during the last General Election, but a federal lawsuit postponed the election. Because of the timing, the turnout was miserable across the state.
Here are the results of the PSC election .
- For the District 3 Democratic seat, there will be a runoff on July 15 for this seat between Keisha Sean Waites, who received 46 percent of the vote, and Peter Hubbard who won 33 percent of the vote. A third candidate got 20 percent, throwing the race to a runoff. The winner will face incumbent Republican Fitz Johnson on November 4 in the 2025 General Election.
- For the District 2 seat, incumbent Republican Tim Echols won his race to face unopposed Democrat Alicia Johnson in November.
As of June 24, 2025, there were 7.4 million people registered to vote in the PSC election. But only 207,954 voted, or 2.8 percent of active registered voters. Can you imagine how many will return to the polls on July 15 to actually nominate a person for this seat? Few.
That’s right. That’s also a mighty puny way to nominate someone for an important state office.
Think, too, about the cost to the individual counties to have several people man the polls for this election. It makes you shake your head in wonder about some ways our democracy actually works.
Now look at another entirely different election last week, in New York City, where there were 11 candidates running for mayor. Six of the 11 candidates achieved at least 1 percent of the vote.
Before the race, many thought former Gov. Andrew Cuomo would win the Democratic nomination.
But no. Instead, a newcomer, Zuhran Mamdani, upset the favorite handily. Note, too, that Mr. Mamdani is a Muslim, the first of his religion to win this nomination for mayor in New York. That shows the power of diversity today in politics!
But here’s the second kicker in this race: New York City was using ranked-choice voting. That meant that though Mr. Mamdani did not win a majority, but won only 43.5 percent of the vote, to 36.4 percent for Mr. Cuomo, Mamdani was still declared the nominee without the need of having a runoff!
Now, consider this: had Georgia had ranked-choice voting, and required that the leader have at least 40 percent of the vote, there would be no need for a puny runoff election.
Think of the cost New York City would be facing had they not decided to rank-choice the candidates. It would be high.
And now Georgia must go through a statewide runoff for this single post on the Public Service Commission. Besides the high cost of the runoff, think of the poor election workers who will man the polls in the run-off in the 159 counties of Georgia. They will sit there for 12 hours (7 a.m. to 7 p.m.) and be bored stiff.
We feel that the idea of ranked-choice voting will be a growing method to elect officials in more and more states in the next few years. However, we suspect that the Georgia Legislature, consisting of politicians in both the major parties who are not always forward-thinking, will take ages before they accept the ideas of ranked-choice voting. It just seems like to many people ranked choice is a better way, but few in the Legislature think that way.
What a major contrast these two June elections provided!
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