High cost of run-off elections
 

 
By BARBARA L. PARSONS, Bainbridge Post-Seartchlight  December 07, 2004 
 
 
The high cost of run-off elections has officials concerned all the way from the county level to the progressive chief of Georgia elections herself, Secretary of State Cathy Cox.

Cox made some comments about the recent run-off election held Nov. 23 for the Georgia Court of Appeals seat during her speech at the Bainbridge Lions Club recently. She noted that while the Nov. 2 presidential election had the ?all-time record turnout of 78 percent? voter turnout for the Nov. 23 election barely made it past 5 percent.

?The turnout was unfortunate because it?s just such an important issue to vote whenever we have elections. Hopefully we?re done with elections for the year and can move forward,? Cox said.

Statewide voter turnout for the Nov. 23 runoff election between Debra Bernes, who won the runoff, and Howard Mead, was 244,367 out of 4,267,504 registered voters. In Decatur County, 405 votes were cast for Mead and Bernes received 323 votes for a voter turnout of 5.9 percent. Three weeks earlier 9,012 voters out of 12,376 showed up at Decatur County polls for the presidential elections, a nearly 73 percent turnout rate.

The statewide runoff election cost the state and its counties more than $2 million, Cox said.

?The state pays a lot of the expense and a lot of the paperwork that?s used at elections. But the counties have to pay the expense of paying the poll workers and some counties have to rent facilities and that kind of thing,? Cox said. ?We may have to take a closer look at how we do runoff elections in situations like that.?

Cox said a lot of states don?t have runoff elections. She doesn?t know if the state wants to go down that path or not, but the Nov. 23 election was a classic case of a situation that cost the state and counties a lot of money. She joked about the losing candidate, Mead, spending about $2.5 million of his own money on the campaign.

?Now, if he had paid that to the state to pay for the elections, he might have gotten more votes,? Cox said. ?It was a very expensive election because that race was on the ballot in July. There were about seven candidates to start with, and so there was going to be a runoff, but the third place candidate lost getting into the runoff by about 280 votes. And it turns out that Lyons County over in Dublin printed his name wrong on their absentee ballots, putting his name as Thomas Mead instead of Howard Mead.?

As a result, Cox said, Mead challenged the election results and it went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court. About 400 of the absentee ballots had been cast using the misprinted name and, because Mead lost by only 280 votes, the Supreme Court said the whole election had to be done over again.

?So that?s why it went back on the ballot in November. The other four candidates ped out and the other three went on and then we had to have the run-off November 23,? Cox said. ?We now have a great election board here in Decatur County, and it can tell you that elections are a very complex process and you have to absolutely obsess about the details. Something just that minor can end up costing millions and millions of dollars because of somebody?s oversight.?

Interim county election official Doris White said turn-out for the election held in July of this year was even lower in Decatur County, about 3 percent. Poll workers cost $12,118 for the Nov. 2 election.

?For the November 23 runoff election, we had three poll workers for each precinct, which is the minimum called in, for 51. The total cost for them was $5,485. We also had a review panel that had to be paid $15, so that added up to $5,500 plus whatever Diebold charges for setting up the voting machines and running logic and accuracy tests on them. They have a technician who tests the machines before, during and after the elections,? White said.

County clerk Faye Gunn said Diebold technicians for the Nov. 2 election cost the county $4,320 and that amount should be about the same for the runoff election. When that amount is added to poll worker costs for the last election, the county will have spent $9,820.