Habersham County Commissioner Jimmy Tench was re-elected Tuesday night without a runoff, earning 55% of the vote against two challengers to win a second term. There are no Democrats running against him November.
Tench got 4,687 of the 8,518 votes, easily outpacing Jimmy Dean (2,149) and Jason Mark Smith (1,682).
Dustin Mealor was unopposed in the primary in District 2 and he will join Tench on the county commission through 2026.
The Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST) was renewed for five more years with 61.2 percent of the vote.
"On behalf of our students, teachers, and staff I want to extend a big thank you to those in our community who voted yes for renewing ESPLOST," Superintendent Matthew Cooper said Tuesday night. "This is a huge victory for the future of our public school system and for Habersham County property owners. We can now continue to use the penny sales tax to pay off debt on new school construction, to buy new school buses, to provide the best technology for our schools, and to create additional classroom space for students. It’s a great night for the more than 7,000 students and 1,200 employees in our school system. I could not be happier as superintendent."
In Mt. Airy, the voters approved Sunday package liquor sales starting at 12:30 p.m. Sundays by a 157-84 vote.
Presumptive GOP nominees for Governor and U.S. Senate respectively - Gov. Brian Kemp and Herschel Walker - easily crushed their challengers in Habersham County precincts. U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde had 76 percent of the vote with almost 60 percent of precincts reporting to ostensibly earn his party's nomination to run for a second term.
Early voting in the primary ended Friday with an all-time high of more than 850,000 voters either casting a ballot in person or returning an absentee ballot.
Those totals represented a 168 percent increase over early voting ahead of the last gubernatorial primaries in 2018 and a 212 percent jump over early voting turnout for the primaries two years ago.
In Habersham County, there were nearly as many early (4,854) and absentee (445) votes combined as there were total votes in the 2018 primary, falling just 165 votes short of surpassing the previous midterm primary turnout (5,464) before Election Day even began.
Unofficial turnout in Habersham County was 32.57 percent after the election Tuesday.
Read all about the election in the weekend edition of The Northeast Georgian.