Most of Coastal Georgia skipped May primary election

May 23, 2024, 5 p.m.: Correction: This story has been updated to reflect a corrected number of non-voters in Coastal Georgia.

About 60,000 people in Georgia’s six coastal counties felt enough energy about May partisan primaries and nonpartisan judicial votes to go cast a ballot. That’s out of roughly 380,000 potential voters.

This isn’t unusual. Voter turnout is highest when a future president is on a November ballot and is consistently lower for all other elections. 

It’s so low that relatively few votes can decide which Republican or Democrat will coast to the state legislature or sheriff’s office in November elections — most districts and counties are so reliably red or blue that elections this fall won’t be competitive. 

But governance of a whole county can depend on as few people as can fit in a school bus.

Consider Camden County, beset by several local scandals like deputies so reckless that taxpayers will pay higher insurance on them this year. Or for the sheriff’s part, the deteriorating jail conditions that he blames in part on a county government choosing to spend $12 million on a doomed spaceport. 

The folks who make these decisions are the five members of the Camden County Commission and the sheriff.  And two of those Camden commission seats were won yesterday by margins of 81 votes and 31 votes.  Those Republican primary winners have no Democratic opposition in the fall.

People sit out elections for a lot of reasons that fill up academic discussions and might even sound familiar.

For example, the uncontested election for a coroner or tax commissioner can feel like a pretty low-stakes, missable event.

Sometimes voters are satisfied to let others decide, especially if the candidates are just names on a page, faces on a mailer filled out with word salad.  It would take valuable time and effort to study the candidates — social scientists call this a kind of “cost” that not everyone wants to or can pay. 

Some potential voters think they or their group can’t control anything anyway or that the contest doesn’t offer them anything. (Which is part of why young people stay away from voting more than their parents and grandparents.)

The United States itself comes with a lot of arcane detail that takes time to figure out.  Elected officials on the federal, state and local levels of government have some part in big issues, like environmental protection and education funding. The elections are also at different times: there’s always something in even-numbered years and sometimes in odd-numbered years too.  In the U.S., voters choose among primary candidates. In most other democracies, party leaders and activists make those decisions.

Democrats in Georgia also say the voting process dampens turnout in the Republican-run state: Election Day isn’t a holiday, people don’t automatically get a mail-in ballot in the mail, the early-voting location or polling place might be far away. 

Lower registration used to be a problem in Georgia — but since 2016, that’s nearly vanished since voter registration now comes with a state drivers license.

Yet the lack of engagement extends to candidacy, too.  Counting all races in the six coastal Georgia counties — the partisan primaries for jobs in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and county seats, plus nonpartisan judicial races — there were 143 elections on the May ballot.  According to the list published by the Georgia Secretary of State, there were 195 candidate names printed on ballots.  On average, fewer than two people ran in every race. So, most races were uncontested anyway. 

The Tide brings news and observations from The Current staff.