By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JUNE 28, 2024 | It’s discouraging, and we hate to bring it up, but Gwinnettians do not take voting very seriously, at least in the recent primary and its runoff. We make this deduction after looking at how many people voted in these 2024 elections.
To cite figures:
- Of the 516,022 registered voters in Gwinnett County, during the May 21 primary only 78,091 people voted. That is only 15.1 percent of people in Gwinnett who considered it important to go to the polls. The other 84.9 percent apparently didn’t care.
- In the June 16 runoff primary, the results were far more discouraging. In the only county-wide race, that for a State Court judgeship, just 16,833 people voted. That’s 3.2 percent of the 516,022 Gwinnett registered voters who named a State Court judge. Why did so few vote? The turnout was horrible!
- Take a look at the one race for the Georgia House of Representatives. In the runoff for District 96, Arlene Beckles won a seat in that august body by charming 217 people to vote for her, while her opponent, Sonia Lopez, got 116 votes. As of the 2020 Census, Georgia state House members represent an average of 59,585 residents. If this district is average, that means that 0.3 percent selected a House member! Do the 99.7 percent in that district not care?
Let’s look at the two non-partisan races for the School Board.
In District 1, it was the tightest race, with the results decided by 17 votes. Rachel Stone had 1,868 votes while incumbent Karen Watkins polled 1,851 votes. That’s a total of 3,719 votes for the runoff, while the five candidates in the primary polled 18,590 votes, meaning only 20 percent of those voting in the primary returned for the runoff!
In District 3 for the School Board, Steve Gasper won with 4,081 votes, compared to 2,632 for Shana White, or 6,713 votes. In the primary vote in this race, 15,388 turned out at the polls, so 43.6 percent returned for the runoff, for this year, a better-than-average return.
All these figures should make all of us pause. It could perhaps show that Gwinnettians don’t think that voting is such a major element in most people’s lives. And to think of all the candidates, who work prodigiously for several months, thinking of all types of ways to reach people….who don’t seem to care. It must be discouraging to many candidates.
Newcomers to Georgia might not know of this. But the voting by few people reminds us of former Governor Marvin Griffin, who ran against Carl Sanders back in 1962. Griffin was a newspaper publisher from Bainbridge, a former House member, state adjutant general, lieutenant governor and then governor. But young and newcomer Sanders trounced him, bringing a new day to Georgia.
A major way to campaign in those pre-television days was to throw political barbecues around the state, attracting large crowds to hear the candidates. Griffin is remembered for saying: “Some of the people who ate my barbecue didn’t vote for me.”
Candidates in Gwinnett must have been disappointed that, from all the people they talked to in this year’s campaign, few showed up to vote.
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