In one of two contested races in Tuesday’s primary election for Public Service Commission seats, voters chose a clear winner in incumbent Tim Echols. The other race — for the Democratic nominee in District 3 — is headed to a runoff.
The still undecided race goes to a second round of voting after neither Keisha Sean Waites nor Peter Hubbard earned more than half the votes. The race was complicated by the disqualification of frontrunner Daniel Blackman, a former EPA regional administrator, after early voting was underway. A third candidate, Robert Jones, further split the vote. Results are preliminary as some counties have provisional votes yet to be counted.
The statewide runoff election will be held on July 15. Early voting in the runoff begins as soon as possible, but no later than July 7 – July 11. The winner will represent the Democrats for the District 3 race in November against incumbent Republican Fitz Johnson, who ran unopposed in the primary.
Incumbent Tim Echols won the Republican race for the District 2 seat, garnering more than triple the votes cast for challenger Lee Muns. In November, Echols will face Democratic challenger Alicia Johnson, who ran unopposed in the primary.
Voter turnout was about 2% percent of eligible voters for this low profile and off-year election. The sparse participation was no surprise. The PSC remains obscure despite the fact that this board of five regulators has a big impact on Georgians’ wallets: The commissioners determine how much millions of Georgians pay for electricity. And Georgia Power bills have soared, with six rate hikes since the end of 2022.
Eligibility to vote in the runoff is limited to those who voted in the Democratic primary and eligible voters who did not vote at all in the primary, said Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Secretary of State. Voters who pulled a Republican ballot for the primary will have to sit out the runoff.
“The reason it’s confusing is everybody thinks a primary is an election, and it’s not,” Hassinger said. “It’s just a nomination process.”
And because of what Hassinger called “unprecedentedly low turnout” in the primary, there are likely to be far fewer polling places open for the runoff.
“There were somewhere between 80 and 100 counties with less than 1% turnout, which gives them the option on election day of only having one polling location open,” Hassinger explained.