A Georgia election with few voters: Turnout is 'miserably low' in the race for utility regulator

ATLANTA — Every time the door swings open this week at the county courthouse in the tiny south Georgia town of Statenville, six election workers have a moment to hope that someone is coming to vote.

''Anybody that comes in pretty much has to walk by our office," said Renee Church, the elections supervisor in Echols County.

But through noon on Wednesday, none of those passersby had voted in the runoff to choose either Peter Hubbard or Keisha Waites as the Democratic nominee for a seat on Georgia's Public Service Commission.

Welcome to a statewide election where almost nobody came.

Through the first two of five days of early in-person voting, only 9,822 ballots were accepted. That's 0.13% of active voters, what Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, called ''miserably low turnout.''

Early in-person voting runs through Friday, with the election day set for Tuesday. Anyone can vote, except for the more than 63,000 people who voted in Republican primaries on June 17 including one in which incumbent Tim Echols beat GOP challenger Lee Muns.

Waites was the top vote-getter in a June 17 Democratic primary, but didn't get a majority. That meant she had to face the second-place finisher, Hubbard, in a runoff to determine the party nominee. Barring an upswell in voter numbers, fewer than 1% of Georgia's 7.4 million active voters could cast ballots. The winner will go on to face Republican incumbent Fitz Johnson in November.

Despite the low turnout, Hubbard and Waites continue to push, telling voters that breaking the Republican hold on the five-member body will mean a difference in their electric bills. The commission sets rates and oversees generation plans for Georgia Power, which serves 2.3 million customers statewide. Customers have seen bills rise six times in recent years, and a typical Georgia Power residential customer now pays more than $175 a month, including taxes.

''If you don't like the direction your power bills are going, then you have a choice. You could do something about it,'' Hubbard said Wednesday.

A green energy advocate, Hubbard touts his experience testifying before the commission and developing alternative plans that emphasize a shift toward solar power stored in batteries, rather than building more natural gas plants.

''A vote for Peter Hubbard is a vote to put a commissioner on the Public Service Commission who brings deep experience, who can hit the ground running with novel ideas to drive down power prices while inviting economic growth to our state,'' he said.

Waites, a former state House member and former Atlanta City Council member, emphasizes that she would give representation to Black people and Democrats on the commission. In a statement Wednesday, Waites said her previous experience in office would help her ''work with utility companies, legislators, and stakeholders to secure fair rates.''

''I plan to lower energy bills by advocating for increased transparency in utility rate-setting, promoting competition within the energy sector, and prioritizing clean, renewable energy sources to reduce dependence on fossil fuels,'' Waites said in the statement.

It's not like the low turnout is a surprise. Only about 140,000 people cast ballots in the June 17 Democratic primary, about 2% of voters statewide. Many Republican-leaning counties had less than 1% turnout in the Democratic primary, allowing them to activate a rarely used state law to consolidate early-voting and election day polling places to one location. A total of 76 counties triggered that clause to save money, according to the secretary of state's office.

Officials in Walton County, east of Atlanta, predict they would have spent $42,000 to operate three early voting locations and 16 election day precincts. Cutting back to only one of each, Assistant Elections Director Lisa Clark said the runoff will now cost $5,600 in a county where only 21 of nearly 79,000 active voters had cast ballots through Tuesday.

''When it comes to public service commissioner, people don't even know what a public service commissioner is or what they do," Clark said. "So we were not surprised. We were hopeful it would have been bigger, but we were not surprised.''

Echols isn't the only one of Georgia's 159 counties without voters in the early going. Also recording no ballots in the first two days were Chattahoochee, Clay, Glascock, Miller and Telfair counties, while seven other counties recorded one vote. But Brittany Reynolds, the election supervisor in southwest Georgia's Clay County, said Wednesday that turnout will rise there.

''I do know we will have at least one vote at the end of the day because I plan on voting myself," Reynolds said.