Local & State Headlines

District 5 qualifying set

• Candidates for the District 5 Dougherty County Commission seat will qualify Monday-Wednesday.

Carlton Fletcher

ALBANY — After a day of confusion and wrangling, it appears specifics of the special primary election to fill the seat of District 5 County Commissioner Art Searles, who died suddenly Tuesday of an apparent heart attack, have been set.

Dougherty County Board of Elections Supervisor Carolyn Hatcher announced Thursday that Dougherty Democratic Party Chair Constance Burkes’ request to hold qualifying in the downtown Government Center had been OK’d. Candidates wishing to qualify for the office may do so Monday and Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Wednesday from 9 a.m. to noon in Room 160 of the Government Center.

“I made the request to hold qualifying at the elections office because there was no time to find another place,” said Burkes, who in the wake of Searles’ sudden death, worked with state and county officials to assure that the Georgia Code was followed in the process of finding a replacement for Searles, a Democrat.

Georgia Democratic Party spokesman Martin Matheny had contacted local news media shortly after Searles’ death to announce that the state party would name a candidate to replace the commissioner on the Nov. 4 general election ballot. Secretary of State Karen Handel’s office ruled, however, that Section 21-2-134(d) of the Official Code of Georgia clearly called for a special election in a situation like the one surrounding the District 5 seat.

“I’m going to have to say that if it had not been for my tenacity in pursuing this matter, we would have been in a mess here,” Burkes said. “My job as chair is to protect the Democratic Party.

“I might add that while doing research on the state Code, I’ve found that proper procedure may not have been followed in placing Richard Anson’s name on the (Dougherty) School Board ballot.”

Anson, the Dougherty County School System’s current at-large board member, had announced he would step down from the board, but when District 1 Democratic nominee Judith Corbett dropped out of the race after the July 15 primary rather than face incumbent board member David Maschke, the state party selected Anson as the Democratic candidate without, Burkes noted, contacting the local party.

Anson said Thursday evening that he has no doubts that proper procedure was followed.

“The state Democratic Party has assured me that their attorney looked into this matter thoroughly, and everything that was done was done in a completely proper and a completely appropriate manner,” Anson said.

Candidates for the District 5 commission seat, meanwhile, are required to pay a $288 qualifying fee. Voters in Precincts 9, 10, 14, 15, 17 and parts of 8 and 29 will vote in the special election, according to elections officials.

“This qualifying will have to go like clockwork,” Hatcher said. “We’ll have to get the list of qualified candidates and get it to our ballot builder (at Kennesaw State University) as quickly as possible. We have to start mailing out ballots by Sept. 18, and that doesn’t give us much time.”