A tiny number of voters are deciding Georgia’s next member of Congress, an expensive summertime runoff for representation that will last just a few weeks.
The election to replace the late U.S. Rep. David Scott will ensure that 765,000 Georgians have a voice, but the race highlights how the state’s requirement for runoffs comes with high costs, depresses turnout, and delays filling one of the state’s 14 seats in Congress.
Turnout was so low in last month’s special election that it cost taxpayers over $40 per voter to run the election, mostly to pay poll workers, according to two counties that provided their election spending, Gwinnett and Rockdale.
Early voting is underway this week in the six suburban Atlanta counties that make up Congressional District 13, a semicircular band that stretches from south of the city to its east, including all of Rockdale County and parts of Clayton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Henry and Newton counties.
Election day is Aug. 25, and the winner will serve roughly nine weeks in Washington before the end of the term in January.
Two Democratic candidates received the most votes among five people who ran in the special election last month, but a Georgia law calls for runoffs when no candidate wins over 50% of the vote.
Marcye Scott, who worked with her father during his 23 years in Congress, faces Everton Blair, former chair of the Gwinnett school board.
Both candidates said Georgia should get rid of runoffs.
“It’s a waste of time and a waste of taxpayer dollars. It could have already been done and people could already have representation right now,” Scott said. “Gas prices are high, food prices are high, tariffs are going up. It’s very important to have representation.”
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Scott, who received 46% of the vote, said whoever receives the most votes should win the election, without the need for a runoff.
Blair said Georgia legislators should adopt ranked-choice voting, a system in which voters rank candidates based on their preferences. If no candidate wins a majority, votes for lower-ranked candidates are then considered, avoiding the need for a runoff election.
“I would be a huge proponent to push for ranked-choice voting or a mechanism that doesn’t require people to come out a second time,” said Blair, who received 37% of the vote. “The 13th Congressional District doesn’t have any representation right now while Congress has a lot of important votes this fall, including the budget, decisions about whether to cut funding to Israel, and ending this war in the Middle East.”
The stakes in Washington are high, but the turnout in Georgia’s special election is low.
Just 20,510 voters participated in last month’s election, a 3.6% turnout among all registered voters in the district. Turnout usually declines further during runoffs.
Election officials need to hire staff for one week of early voting and election day in the runoff, no matter how many people choose to show up, said Rockdale Election Supervisor Cynthia Willingham. The initial special election cost Rockdale taxpayers $130,000; the runoff will cost about $80,000 because the early voting period is shorter.
“We don’t control what the (runoff) law is. Our job is to conduct the election. I leave all the opinions up to the legislators,” Willingham said. “We have to remember the purpose of this special election is so we can have representation in Congress.”
In Gwinnett, it cost between $325,000 and $350,000 for the initial special election, and the runoff will cost about $275,000, said Acting Elections Supervisor Kelvin Williams.
“While turnout is slow in special elections, especially those held in the summer, it shouldn’t discourage any of us,” Williams said. “It’s always important to exercise one’s right to vote regardless of how big or small an election is.”
Legislators in the Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly have shown little appetite for eliminating runoffs, even after Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock defeated Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in runoffs for U.S. Senate in January 2021.
Georgia’s voting overhaul law passed later that year allowed ranked-choice voting for members of the military and other overseas voters, but since then, Republican lawmakers have introduced bills that would ban ranked-choice voting for everyone else, saying they want candidates to receive a majority of votes to win. Those bills haven’t passed.
“Runoffs are stupid,” said Scot Turner, a Republican and former legislator who leads Eternal Vigilance Action, an election advocacy organization. “We continue to do the same things over and over again, and we get less representative results with fewer voters.”
Turner said ranked-choice voting would allow all ballots in the initial election to be counted and a winner declared, without requiring voters to return for a runoff.
While the special election will finish the term of David Scott, who died in April at age 80, the winner won’t serve in office for long.
Democratic voters chose state Rep. Jasmine Clark, a Democrat from Lilburn, as their candidate for the next two years in the U.S. House starting in January. Clark won 53% of the vote among six Democrats in May’s primary, and she’ll face Republican Jonathan Chavez in the general election. Neither Clark nor Chavez ran in the special election.
“These runoffs probably are costing taxpayers a lot more than they should for something that yields such low turnout,” said Clark, who said Georgia should consider ranked-choice voting in special elections and other low-turnout contests. “The voters deserve to have representation in Congressional District 13, but there are probably better and more efficient ways to do that.”
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