County supports Chambliss, McCain

Alan Mauldin

MOULTRIE — U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss did well on his home turf Tuesday, as did Republican candidates across the board in the heavily GOP county.

The Senate race had not been decided, but among Colquitt County voters Chambliss finished with nearly 70 percent of the votes with only absentee ballots left to be tabulated.

In 20 of 21 precincts, with one of those precincts consisting of early votes cast, Chambliss received 8,062 votes, 64.73 percent, to 4,052 for Democratic opponent Jim Martin, who finished with 32.53 percent among Colquitt County voters.

Libertarian Allen Buckley received 336 votes, or 2.70 percent.

Overall, 13,497 Colquitt County voters cast ballots in the 45-day early voting period and on election day. The total of 69.45 percent of registered voters who cast ballots actually was down slightly from the 2004 presidential election, when 73.5 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

The early voting did have an appreciable impact on the polls, said Wes Lewis, election supervisor in the county.

“I think we’re seeing with the early voting, the early vote percentage really cleared it out at the precincts,” he said. “There was some waiting, but nothing like I predicted.

“I had no reports of any major long lines, just some bottlenecks in the early morning and maybe at lunch.”

At the Shaw precinct, poll workers found about 50 voters waiting in line when the doors opened at 7 a.m., which represented the only long wait of the day, poll worker Gidge Taylor said.

As of 5:40 p.m. 603 voters had cast ballots, she said.

“We might get near 700 voters,” Taylor said. “It just depends. We thought there might be a big rush after 5 (p.m.) but so far it hasn’t been. I think it’s going extremely well. It’s been steady like this all day, but never long lines except that one time when we opened up.”

Lewis said no other problems or machine malfunctions were reported during the day.

Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama fared the worst of his party’s candidates in the county, receiving 3,911 votes, or 30.37 percent. In that race Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain received 8,845 votes, 68.69 percent, and Libertarian candidate Bob Barr had 102, or 0.79 percent.

U.S. House District 8 Democratic incumbent Jim Marshall fared best in the county among Democrats with 44.70 percent of the vote, receiving 5,385 votes. Republican opponent Rick Goddard finished with 6,657 votes, 55.26 percent of votes cast.

Colquitt County voters supported constitutional amendments 1 and 2, but were opposed by a slim majority the third amendment on the ballot.

There were 578 absentee ballots outstanding Tuesday night.

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