Last week’s presidential preference primary and local bond referendum saw only one of every six eligible Putnam County voters cast ballots that approved the sale of up to $22 million in general obligation bonds and – surprise, surprise – backed Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the Democratic and Republican standard-bearers in November’s general election.
Although the county’s taxing powers back general obligation bonds, the risk is relatively low and the reward could possibly result in as much as 20 more miles of county road resurfacings, according to Commission Chairman Bill Sharp and County Manager Paul Van Haute.
The bonds are expected to be paid off with the proceeds of the ongoing Transportation-Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (T-SPLOST), approved by voters two years ago.
Even with an additional $2.5 million in closing costs (interest, bond attorneys, consultants), the idea is that large savings were to be had from packaging the T-SPLOST project list into one or two large bid contracts while also taking advantage of E.R. Snell’s temporary asphalt plant alongside U.S. 441, north of Eatonton.
The bond referendum passed, 1,626 to 952 votes.
As for the March 12 voter turnout, the secretary of state’s office listed 16,110 active voters eligible here. With 2,646 casting ballots, that becomes a 16.4 percent turnout. Even that figure is a bit generous, considering that another 1,544 “inactive” voters could have cast ballots. Inactive voters are those who have not voted in the past two two-year general election cycles (2020 and 2022).
As for the presidential preference primary of last week’s voting, it seems a bit misleading to draw too many conclusions from the statistics when one of the major parties featured an incumbent president and the other had seen the withdrawal of the last serious challenger to an ex-president’s hopes for renomination.
In short, other than the local bond referendum, there was not much to draw people to the polls.
On a party vs. party basis, the Republican vote here skunked the Democrats, 2,241 to 377. On a Biden vs. Trump basis, Biden drew all but 13 of the Democratic votes here, or 96.6 percent, compared to Trump’s 89 percent of the GOP vote.
The only ponderable feature was just how much anti-Trump sentiment existed among GOP voters here, as suggested by former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s vote totals and whether some Democrats may have voted in the GOP primary.
Haley got all of 228 votes – about 10 percent of the GOP total – but 152 of them came during advance voting before she withdrew from the race. Haley drew just 65 votes on election day.