Tompkins defeats Darr for Muscogee County sheriff by 417 votes

Challenger Donna Tompkins has defeated incumbent Muscogee County Sheriff John Darr by a margin of 6,434 votes to 6,017 votes, or 51.67 percent to 48.33 percent, according to unofficial final results from the Columbus Office of Elections and Registrations.

Tompkins said she now has to catch up on state-mandated training for newly elected sheriffs.

“Tomorrow I go to the Georgia Sheriff’s Association in Forsyth, because most of the sheriffs started right after the election, so I’m going to be catching up,” she said. “I have to be there tomorrow evening, and pick up in class.... It’s four weeks of training, and I’ve missed two and a half already.”

Tompkins, who recently retired as a sheriff’s captain, said she’ll already be familiar with much of the course work because of her experience.

“Then I come back and the transition begins,” she said.

Tompkins said she believes she’ll be sworn in as sheriff on Jan. 3.

Since the margin of victory was not within the 1 percent required for a mandatory recount, Darr would need to request one. At about 9:30 p.m., after the elections office had declared her the winner, she said she had not yet heard from Darr.

Tompkins ran as a Democrat, and Darr ran as an independent.

In five days of early voting last week, 3,725 Columbus residents voted at the midtown Citizens Service Center off Macon Road. The score from those votes was 2,161 for Tompkins and 1,528 for Darr.

A Ledger-Enquirer check of individual voter precinct results showed Darr with about a 52 percent to 48 percent lead, but the tally flipped those percentages in Tompkins’ favor after the early votes were added.

In the Nov. 8 General Election, Tompkins had 29,866 votes to Darr’s 21,608, or 44.3 to 32 percent. With Republican Mark LaJoye taking 20.2 percent and write-in candidate Pam Brown drawing 3.4 percent, neither of the top two had the majority needed to win outright.

Brown on Monday endorsed Darr in the runoff. LaJoye endorsed Tompkins in a news conference on Nov. 15, as did Democrat Robert Keith Smith, formerly a district attorney’s investigator whom the elections board disqualified from the May 24 Democratic Primary.

The elections board disqualified both Smith and Brown on March 30 for failing to meet a filing deadline. The board later disqualified Tompkins and LaJoye for similar reasons, but a Superior Court judge overturned the board in their case. A different judge upheld the board’s disqualifying Smith and Brown, after which Brown qualified as a write-in candidate.

A prominent campaign issue had been Darr’s lawsuit against city leaders, which claimed they violated Columbus’ charter by dictating his office’s budget rather than abiding by the one he submitted for council’s approval.

Tompkins, a retired sheriff’s captain, has said the lawsuit reflects Darr’s failure to deal professionally with the city.

She has pledged to drop the suit, institute financial accountability to keep the office’s operations within the budget approved by council, and restore trust between the sheriff and city leaders.

Darr has been Muscogee’s sheriff since 2008, when as a Democrat he defeated incumbent Ralph Johnson, an independent, in a presidential election that pitted Barack Obama against John McCain. Darr became an independent after Brown nearly unseated him in the Democratic Primary in 2012, when a recount showed she lost by about 60 votes out of more than 17,000.

This story was originally published December 6, 2016 at 10:07 PM with the headline "Tompkins defeats Darr for Muscogee County sheriff by 417 votes."