After seeing her lead whittled to just a few hundred votes after Tuesday’s election-day votes were counted, Democrat Jerica Richardson now has a lead of 1,208 votes over Republican Fitz Johnson for the District 2 seat on the Cobb Board of Commissioners.
Richardson and Johnson are vying to succeed Republican three-term commissioner Bob Ott,, who decided not to run again.
According to figures updated Wednesday night by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, Richardson has 53,509 votes to 52,301 for Johnson.
That’s a margin of 50.57 to 49.43 percent, which would preclude a recount.
UPDATED, 5:30 P.M. THURSDAY:
Additional ballots counted have pushed Richardson’s lead to 1,224 votes (53,642 to 52,418), and a margin of 50.58 to 49.42 percent.
Recounts in Georgia are allowed if the difference between two candidates is 0.5 percent of the vote or less.
Candidate profiles
You can read through the results by clicking here. The latest numbers include mailed-in absentee ballots.
Early-voting numbers for the candidates were very close: 22,167 for Richardson, and 21,269 for Johnson.
He got 11,061 votes from in-person election-day voting, while she received 6,322.
But Richardson has been able to pull away with mail-in absentee votes.
She has received 25,020 of those, and Johnson has 19,971.
“It doesn’t look great but we just have to wait and see what happens,” said Johnson, who won the Republican nomination in similar fashion, with a razor-thin edge over Andy Smith in a runoff in August.
Johnson won most precincts in East Cobb and his home base in Vinings (indicated in blue on the map above), while Richardson took most of the precincts in the Cumberland-Vinings-Smyrna area (in green).
In an interview with East Cobb News, Richardson said she expected the race to be close, and credited Johnson with “running an impeccable campaign. He’s a Cobb success story and he ran a very cordial campaign.
“Yes, it was really close, and I think the community benefits from that.”
Cobb Elections had 15,000 votes to count as of Wednesday, but that number is now down to 700 remaining absentee ballots, according to a message sent Thursday morning.
On Friday, another 882 provisional ballots will be processed, along with military ballots postmarked on election days.
Voters who need to “cure” their ballots—addressing those with missing or mismatched signatures, among other things—will have that done on Friday as well.
As we noted earlier, this race will swing party control on the five-member commission from Republicans, who have had a 4-1 advantage, two Democrats, with a 3-2 split.
Commissioner Lisa Cupid, who defeated Cobb Commission Chairman Mike Boyce and Monique Sheffield’s, her successor in South Cobb, are the other Democrats.
In January, Richardson, Cupid and Sheffield will form a board majority, joining Republicans JoAnn Birrell of Northeast Cobb and Keli Gambrill of North Cobb.
The Cobb Board of Elections and Registration will certify all the results next Friday, Nov. 13.
The District 2 race isn’t the only nailbiter left.
In the State House District 43 seat in East Cobb, Republican State Rep. Sharon Cooper leads Democrat Luisa Wakeman by 487 votes, with all but remaining absentee and provisional ballots counted.
Cooper has 15,874 votes, or 50.78 percent, to 15,387 votes for Wakeman, or 49.22 percent.
That’s even closer than Cooper’s win over Wakeman in 2018, which was by less than 800 votes.
The current numbers were updated Thursday at 9:30 a.m. If they stand, that margin of the vote also would preclude a recount.
Cooper declared victory on Wednesday, while Wakeman said she’s waiting for every vote to be counted.
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