Congratulations to the incumbent mayor of Reidsville who won another term in office tonight! SouthsideCentral is now 1 for 1 in our endorsements this year. 🙂 But we’ve got some questions about the City Council at-large elections.
James Festerman won his mayoral race over Donald Gorham & Chuck Faint in Tuesday’s Reidsville elections. Festerman picked up 48% of the vote hanging on over Gorham who pulled 46%. Faint came in a distant third with 6%. Fifty votes was all that spearated the top two candidates, so Faint’s total of 118 votes definitely had an effect on the election.
The Reidsville City Council at-large race was between six candidates with Tom Balsley & Richard Johnson winning seats on the council.
In a quick breakdown of the numbers, one thing really sticks out as mysteriously odd yet surprisingly familiar. There were 2147 votes total for mayor, and since each voter was able to vote for up to 2 candidates, the theoretical number of votes for the city council election should have been 4294. There were only 3678 total votes cast for the council race, so that’s 616 undervotes. That’s pretty good circumstantial evidence for bullet voting. We’re betting that tactical voting strategy propelled Richard Johnson to a rather sizable second-place (and seat-winning) margin of victory over Terresia Scoble.
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