By Elliott Brack
Editor and publisher, GwinnettForum
NOV. 19, 2019 | Every so often in the news business, you find it’s time to eat crow.
Today is such a day for me.
Last Friday we fouled on reporting the results of the Loganville election. Going to the Internet, we posted the results of the 2017 election, thinking we had the 2019 election. We simply did not read the small print correctly, and gave the wrong information.
We first learned that something was amiss when a regular reader from Loganville, Bob Hanson, called. He had read our report on the election in Loganville, and had voted early. “I don’t remember seeing the name of Mike Jones on the ballot,” he said. “Nor did I see that we were voting on the mayor.”
That set in motion an investigation. It ended up when we asked City Manager Danny Roberts to send us the results of the 2019 election. And when we got it from Elections Superintendent Kristi Ash, we immediately realize that we had picked up the results on the city’s web site for the 2017 election.
So to rectify that bad information, here are the correct results of the 2019 voting in Loganville.
For Council in 2019, the results shows that of the total of 751 votes:
- Bill Duvall, 465 votes (62%);
- Jay Boland, 419 votes (56%);
- Linda A. Dodd, 367 (49%) votes;
- Femi Oduwold, 344 (46%) votes; and
- Misty Cox, 287 (38%) votes.
We had also reported the 2017 results for Mayor, where Rey Martinez won. However with Loganville having four year terms, there was no election for mayor this year.
Note, too: the overall direction of last week’s column with the incorrect votes was to show that Loganville has a unique way of electing office-holders. Their method is to have everyone run in one race, and whoever gets the most votes for the number of seats that are open are declared the winners.
Other cities in Gwinnett require that the winning candidate must have a majority of the votes to be declared the winner. Hence, three cities in Gwinnett, Norcross, Snellville and Braselton, will have a runoff on December 3 to determine the final make-up of the City Councils.
In the Loganville vote this year, two of the three winning candidates had a majority, while the third winner, Linda Dodd, was elected, even with no majority, but 49 percent of the votes, and therefore was declared the third winner of the seats available. So, Loganville got a new council without having a runoff, though one candidate did not have a full majority.
That’s a long -inded explanation of why we’re eating crow this week. Thanks, Bob Hanson, for first calling it to our attention. We apologize for our error.
* * * * *
So therefore, if you live by the Internet, you can die by the Internet. Be careful when going to the Internet for anything……..and read completely to make sure what you think you have…..you really have.
We apologize for not paying enough attention to what we saw on the Internet,
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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