Four local races will be decided in the Democratic Primary

Columbus residents voting early in the May 24 state party primaries and local elections have to make an important choice before they choose which candidates to vote for.

They have to choose a ballot.

With both major parties holding primaries at the same time Columbus votes on nonpartisan races, folks headed to the early voting poll in the Community Room of the City Services Center at 3111 Citizens Way will have to pick a Republican, Democratic or nonpartisan ballot.

Because Georgia has open primaries, picking a particular party’s ballot doesn’t make the voter a member of that party. Some folks have misunderstood that, and not wanting to be cast as a partisan, they have chosen a nonpartisan ballot, and subsequently discovered that having eschewed any party affiliation, they didn’t get to vote in the races they wanted to, because those were partisan.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 927 Muscogee County residents had voted early in person. Of those, 755 chose Democratic Party primary ballots; 161 picked Republican Party primary ballots; and 11 chose nonpartisan or independent ballots.

What’s the difference?

Those 172 people who picked Republican and nonpartisan ballots essentially chose not to vote in four Columbus races that will be decided in the Democratic Primary, as no Republican qualified to seek those offices in the November general election.

Those contests are:

▪ Superior Court clerk, in which Ann Hardman is challenging incumbent Linda Pierce.

▪ Municipal Court judge, in which attorney Cynthia Maisano is challenging incumbent Steven Smith.

▪ Municipal Court clerk, in which incumbent Vivian Creighton-Bishop faces challenger Sylvia Hudson.

▪ Muscogee marshal, in which incumbent Greg Countryman is being challenged by retired police officer Bernard Spicer.

To ensure early voters know what they’re getting on each ballot, the elections office is displaying sample ballots for them to view, said elections director Nancy Boren.

Still, if voters get their computer-programmed ballot cards, plug them into the touch-screen voting machines and discover they don’t have the ballots they wanted, they can stop the process there and request different ballots, she said. The point of no return is when the voter taps the “cast ballot” box and the machine ejects the ballot card: Once cast, the ballot is beyond retrieval.

The only way a voter gets stuck with a particular political party is in the event of a party runoff. Having voted Republican or Democrat in a primary, the voter cannot cross over to vote in the other party’s runoff, which would be July 26.

But locally runoffs are most likely in the nonpartisan races that have at least three candidates, increasing the odds that no one contender will get more than 50 percent of the vote. Those nonpartisan races are included in party primary ballots, so no one who picked a partisan ballot would be excluded from voting in a nonpartisan runoff.

Registered voters who have online access — or who would like to get online at the Columbus Public Library that’s next door to the City Services Center — can view sample ballots on the Georgia Secretary of State’s “My Voter Page,” www.mvp.sos.ga.gov.

The schedule for early voting at the City Services Center is from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Early voting ends at 7 p.m. the Friday before Election Day, as the poll will be closed that final weekend.

Voters should bring a government-issued photo ID to show poll workers.

Aside from the early in-person votes cast so far, the elections office has mailed out 968 absentee, hard-copy ballots: 500 Republican, 437 Democrat and 31 nonpartisan, Boren said.

This story was originally published May 4, 2016 at 4:44 PM with the headline "Four local races will be decided in the Democratic Primary."