What voters need to know about the Muscogee County sheriff’s runoff

Columbus faces a tight schedule in the runoff for Muscogee County Sheriff.

Unofficial results Tuesday left Democrat Donna Tompkins with 21,429 votes to incumbent John Darr’s 14,464, or 46 to 31 percent. With Republican Mark LaJoye taking 20 percent and write-in candidate Pam Brown drawing 4 percent, neither of the top two contenders got the majority needed to win outright.

That threw the race to a Dec. 6 runoff, when all county polls will be open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

That leaves a narrow window for early voting, as election workers need time to prepare, and intervening holidays will impede that.

Early voting is expected to be 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Nov. 28 through Dec. 2 in the community room on the ground floor of the City Services Center, 3111 Citizens Way, off Macon Road by the Columbus Public Library, said Nancy Boren, executive director of the county elections board.

Absentee mail-in ballots automatically will be sent to elderly or disabled voters who requested them this year. Anyone else who wants one should contact the elections office at 706-653-4392, she said.

Anyone registered by the Oct. 11 deadline for the General Election is eligible to vote in the runoff, so no one has to have voted Tuesday to vote again.

One reason Columbus has a tight schedule for early voting is the preparation it takes, Boren said:

First the elections board has to certify Tuesday’s results, and voters who filed provisional ballots – usually because they didn’t have the proper identification when they went to the polls – have three days to provide whatever proof they need to establish eligibility.

Friday is Veterans Day, when the city government will close, so the board will not meet until Monday.

The county cannot prepare for another election until the state certifies its results, and the state can’t certify its results until it gets certified results from all the counties, Boren said. That’s not likely until later next week.

Once that’s done, election workers here can start building a computer database to program touch-screen voting machines and begin testing them, Boren said.

They’ll lose a day doing that because of another holiday: Thanksgiving will be Nov. 24, the Thursday before the week of early voting.

This story was originally published November 9, 2016 at 5:20 PM with the headline "What voters need to know about the Muscogee County sheriff’s runoff ."