Confused voters were scrambling for answers Tuesday in a southwest Georgia city after its election officials abruptly resigned Monday afternoon, prompting the cancellation of a special election. The closure of polling sites in Camilla, a majority-Black city of about 5,000 residents, was declared unlawful Tuesday by a judge who ordered their immediate reopening.
Now the city’s mayor, who says the special election is void, is calling for federal government officials to investigate what he claims is judicial corruption. But it was the mayor’s arrest that some residents were calling for Tuesday, according to poll monitors.
Attorney Chris Cohilas, who represents Camilla residents in a yearslong court battle over city council seats to which the Election Day drama relates, said Mayor Kelvin Owens is a “toddler tyrant” who must be prosecuted for criminal election interference.
Cohilas said Owens attempted to scuttle the special election for two city council vacancies after his preferred candidate for one seat was declared unqualified for office by a Mitchell County judge.
“Goal number one is for us to preserve democracy and to make sure that this toddler tyrant is not able to continue to trample on people’s constitutional right to vote,” Cohilas said of the mayor. “The votes are going to be counted and then they’re going to be certified in a courtroom. We will be communicating with state and federal authorities about the criminal violations that occurred with respect to disrupting this election.”
Courtesy City of Camilla
Courtesy City of Camilla
Owens told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that, by law, the special election had to be canceled after Camilla’s election superintendent, Rhunette Williford, and assistant election superintendent, Cheryl Ford, resigned Monday afternoon.
“From our perspective, at seven o’clock this morning when the election did not kick off as advertised, the election became void,” Owens said Tuesday. “It won’t be acknowledged or accepted.”
He said it was unlawful for the chief judge of the South Georgia Judicial Circuit to issue a ruling at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday appointing replacement election officials and ordering polling locations to stay open for 12 hours.
“I’m hoping that the extreme and the chaos of what happened today will finally get our U.S. Department of Justice, anybody, to come down here and take a look,” Owens said.
Judge Heather Lanier said in her order that the special election was “unlawfully stopped, restricted, and hindered by actions of City of Camilla officials.”
Cohilas said the city’s polling sites were open until 3:50 a.m. Wednesday, despite the mayor’s efforts to hinder the special election.
“He had the city manager trying to lock the poll workers out of City Hall last night,” Cohilas said Wednesday. “This is crazy.”
Owens maintains that he followed the law. He said the city’s two polling locations that were closed part of Tuesday were solely for the special election. He said separate polling sites operated by Mitchell County for all other races, including the presidential election, remained open.
The city manager did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Election Day confusion
Voters in Camilla were informed via the city’s public Facebook account Monday night that the “final day of voting and special election scheduled for November 5, 2024 has been canceled.” The post included Williford and Ford’s resignation letter, signed five hours earlier, citing “mental duress, stress, and coercion experienced by recent court decisions regarding our role in elections.”
The city said in its post that the Nov. 5 voting conducted by Mitchell County was not affected. But many Camilla voters were unsure whether their ability to cast ballots Tuesday in county, state and federal races had been hampered.
In comments on the city’s post, people said it seemed to be intentionally poorly written to cause confusion and chaos, warning that some voters might think the handling of presidential election ballots was also canceled.
Owens said the city had been “extremely clear” in its messaging.
New Georgia Project, a nonprofit aimed at empowering historically marginalized voters, said its poll monitors in Camilla witnessed confusion and anger among residents Tuesday. The group’s policy director, Stephanie Jackson Ali, told the AJC that large gatherings of people outside the city’s polling sites became threatening and may have deterred some voters.
“They’ve been calling for the mayor’s arrest. They’ve been somewhat threatening,” she said. “Our staff who are down there felt unsafe and left the area.”
Ali said there was a strong police presence Tuesday in Camilla, where many voters were “charged up.” She said getting accurate information Tuesday about voting in the city was extremely difficult due to the last-minute election changes.
A long-running legal battle intensifies
Camilla’s Election Day drama was the culmination of a legal battle over city council seats that started in 2022 and has made its way to Georgia’s highest court.
In December 2023, the Georgia Court of Appeals upheld a Mitchell County judge’s ruling that Corey Morgan and Venterra Pollard were not city residents and couldn’t serve on the city council. Morgan managed to stay on the council as he was reelected to a second term of four years just before the Court of Appeals issued its decision.
Pollard vacated his seat in June. The city announced in July that it would hold a special election to fill Pollard’s seat and another vacancy created by a council member’s death.
In September, Pollard was allowed by city officials to qualify as a candidate for the special election. But a Mitchell County judge ruled in October that Pollard was not a resident of Camilla and couldn’t hold office. The judge, Howard McClain, ordered Williford and Ford, as the city’s election officials, to remove Pollard from the ballot and discount any votes cast for him.
Williford and Ford asked the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn the county judge’s ruling, but that request was denied on Nov. 1.
“The ultimate requirement to violate our oath of office as election officials is not something either of us are willing to participate in,” Williford and Ford said in their Nov. 4 resignation letter. “We hope the City of Camilla can successfully conclude the election and it is unfortunate, in our opinion, we are left in a position where we have no choice to carry out the duties of election officials in conformity with the law.”
Owens said McClain’s ruling was unlawful. He said his preference would have been for the special election to go ahead with all votes, including those for Pollard, counted. But because Williford and Ford resigned, the special election will have to be conducted anew once the city appoints replacement election officials, he said.
“If they try to certify the results (from Tuesday), there will be a legal challenge to that,” the mayor said.
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