Chatham Elections Supervisor Resigns, Campaigns Rev Up

by Craig Nelson September 15th, 2026September 14th, 2026 Why you can trust The Current

Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026

Good morning! To those of you our readers who marked Rosh Hashanah over the weekend: Shanah tovah! In the news today: Chatham’s elections supervisor resigns, midterm elections campaigning ramps up, and more AI and data center ferment. Finally, we note some things for your radar. Questions, comments, or story ideas? You can reach me at craig.thecurrent@gmail.com.

NEWS: POLITICS

Poll workers count ballots as they come in to the Chatham County Board of Elections on Election Night. Nov. 5, 2024, in Savannah. Credit: Justin Taylor/The Current GA

Chatham elections supervisor resigns

The director of the Chatham County Elections Board has resigned, just six months after assuming the post and less than a month before early voting for midterm elections gets underway, The Current’s Craig Nelson reports.

Brook Schreiner had held the $95,000-a-year post for little more than six months when she submitted her resignation at an executive session of the five-member board Monday afternoon, board member James Hall said in a Facebook post.

The board accepted her decision to step down, Hall said. She will be succeeded by her predecessor, Billy Wooten, who held the position for five years, Hall said. The board was expected on Tuesday to issue an official statement on Schreiner’s departure.

Schreiner’s resignation comes amid persistent worries about the security of Georgia’s election system, which has been roiled in controversy since the 2020 presidential election.

In a phone interview with The Current late Monday, Schreiner, the first woman ever to hold the post of elections supervisor, disparaged the board, saying it had “never met” with her to “let me know what their expectations were.”

“I guess Chatham County wasn’t ready for a strong, opinionated woman because when I see wrongdoing, I’m not looking at it from a political standpoint. I’m looking at the voter. And when I told people, ‘This is not right,’ I got backlash.”

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NEWS: GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT

A early voting sign at the Chatham County Services Building in Savannah, GA on October 17, 2024. Credit: Justin Taylor/The Current GA

Ramping up

With just 28 days remaining before the start of early, in-person voting in much of Coastal Georgia, campaigning for the Nov. 3 elections is ramping up.

Incumbent state Sen. Ben Watson (District 1) will be in Richmond Hill this evening for a meet-and-greet hosted by the Bryan County Republican Party.

Watson’s challenger, Corey Foreman, a Democrat, said his top priority was “going door-to-door — trying to get directly to the voters, letting them know who I am, what the campaign is about and why it’s important for them get involved.”

In the race to succeed U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, efforts by WSAV-TV to stage a debate or candidate forum between Republican candidate Jim Kingston and Democrat Amanda Hollowell appear to have stalled.

Hollowell said Monday she had been informed by WSAV that the Kingston campaign had rejected a proposed candidate forum on Oct. 6 and had yet to provide an alternative date. She said her campaign planned to challenge Kingston to a face-to-face forum using any format and on any date of his choosing.

“We firmly believe that the voters should be able to contrast us both and hear from us both,” she said.

Kingston didn’t respond Monday to request by phone for clarification and comment.

As for statewide races, in a Friday fundraising appeal, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms appeared to acknowledge the latest assessment of a prominent statistician and political forecaster Nate Silver, who last week downgraded her race with Republican Rick Jackson from “lean Democrat” to “complete tossup.”

Jackson, meanwhile, is back in Coastal Georgia this week. He’s scheduled to hold a breakfast rally and fundraiser in Baxley in Appling County on Thursday morning before traveling to Savannah for a reception and fundraiser later that day. The billionaire healthcare executive is scheduled to attend another rally and fundraiser in St. Simons Sunday afternoon.

In the U.S. Senate race, Gov. Brian Kemp championed Derek Dooley in the contest for the Republican nomination. On Monday, however, he endorsed the primary’s winner, Mike Collins.

Like Bottoms, Collins has funding challenges. On Friday, the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC that works to elect Republicans, put $25 million into seven U.S. Senate races. Georgia’s Senate race didn’t make the list.

Whether Kemp’s super PAC, Hardworking Americans; Elon Musk’s America PAC; or President Donald Trump’s MAGA, Inc. and its roughly $400 million in funds enter the breach remains to be seen.

NEWS: VOTING

300 people gather outside the Effingham College & Career Academy to protest the proposed OpenAI data center in Rincon on July 23, 2026. The $20 billion project was announced Wednesday, surprising many local residents. Credit: Justin Taylor/The Current GA/CatchLight/Report for America

‘Meaningful opportunity’

A little more than 24 hours before it was set to convene for its regularly scheduled meeting, the Effingham County Board of Commissioners on Monday announced it was putting off to a “future date” one agenda item: site plan approval for OpenAI’s proposed $20 billion data center in the county, The Current’s Maggie Lee r eports. The county requested more time to review the site plan so the company agreed to a short postponement that should not delay the project timeline, an OpenAI spokesperson said in an e-mail to The Current GA on Monday.

Postponement or not, worries over data centers continued to animate local politics. Echoing a previous move by the Savannah City Council, the Chatham County Commission last week unanimously approved a 155-day moratorium on large data centers, The Current’s Adithi Vimalanathan reported.

There was electoral impact, too: Dismayed by the process leading to the OpenAI deal, James Daniels announced he was running at a write-in candidate in the race for the District 5 seat on Effingham’s county commission.

And, data centers are expected to be a main topic of discussion when the Georgia Public Service Commission convenes a rare meeting in Savannah on Tuesday, starting at 9:30 a.m. at the Chatham County Administrative Building at 124 Bull St. in Savannah.

“The people who live, work, raise families, and build businesses” in Coastal Georgia “deserve a meaningful opportunity to engage directly with the Commission making decisions that affect their monthly bills and their communities,” PSC member Alicia Johnson, a Savannahian, said in a news release.

In a testament to the volatile and unpredictable politics swirling around data centers and artificial intelligence, the “AI Data Center Revolt” bus, a project chaired by January 6 co-organizer and Tea Party co-founder Amy Kremer, is scheduled to arrive in Effingham County on Tuesday in time for the county commission’s meeting.

NEWS: UPDATES

Firefighters participate in the fourth annual 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb at Enmarket Arena in Savannah on Sept. 6, 2026. Participants climbed 110 flights of stairs to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Credit: Justin Taylor/The Current GA/CatchLight/Report for America

11 things for your radar

Marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Savannah-area firefighters honor 343 fallen NYC firefighters, The Current’s Justin Taylor reports.
“A high-stakes mystery is unfolding in the Georgia governor’s race, potentially affecting health insurance for hundreds of thousands of Georgians,” Georgia Recorder’s Ariel Hart writes.
Georgia’s voter registration deadline is approaching. Here are 5 things you need to know.
State Rep. Edna Jackson, a former Savannah, has a room named after her at Savannah State University.
A grand jury indicts Liberty County Commissioner Marion Stevens on two counts of first-degree cruelty to children, The Current’s Robin Kemp reports.
Six people in Chatham County are indicted on drug-trafficking charges, Attorney General Chris Carr announces, following a multistate investigation into the trafficking of illegal narcotics, including carfentanil — a synthetic opioid 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl.
“Electric!” The Current’s Sarah Harwell and Justin Taylor report on Sunday’s HBCU “Battle of the Bands: Battle for the South” at Savannah State University.
“City of Savannah says Savannah Bananas damaged live oaks in Daffin Park,” Savannah Agenda reports.
A Colombian man who says he was unlawfully arrested alongside more than 400 other workers at a Hyundai factory in Georgia has filed a $2 million legal claim against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Gov. Brian Kemp gets angry about the state of college football.
“The money Biden was trying to give folks was the result of a pandemic that the Democrats and [Anthony] Fauci had pulled the wool over our eyes. . . This is apples and oranges here,” Rep. Buddy Carter tells CNN. He was asked about the difference between President Trump’s recent offer of $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans retain control of the Senate and House in midterm elections and the Biden administration providing Americans with $1,400 during the pandemic. Carter called the Biden program wasteful and inflationary, CNN says.