With unofficial returns from Tuesday, Atmore native Lyn Stuart lost her bid for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court to Tom Parker by 15,652 votes and 19,917 registered Escambia County voters didn't cast a ballot. Go Figure.
It gets worse when you look at the numbers across the state of Alabama. According to information released by the secretary of state's office, 2,480,406 registered voters in Alabama didn't vote. Those figures show Escambia County had a 20.59 percent voter turnout and statewide the voter turnout was 26.56 percent.
These numbers are still unofficial until about a week when the votes are officially certified to account for provisional ballots and possibly a hand full of absentee ballots that were postmarked on time but didn't make it to the respective circuit clerk to be counted Tuesday. History tells me that the unofficial total is just about on target except for a vote or two.
Escambia County had 5,164 of its 25,081 registered voters cast ballots and across the state 897,496 of the 3,377,902 registered voters went to the polls.
The sad part is the voter turnout was about what I expected. I predicted Escambia to be around 20 percent and it came in at 20.59 percent. I said we'd be lucky if 30 percent of the voters across the state voted and it came in at 26.57 percent.
To me there weren't a lot of surprises Tuesday. I was more hopeful that Stuart would win, but my gut feeling kept telling me that the Roy Moore die-hard supporters were going to back Parker. But I was optimistic that people in Alabama would see the differences between Stuart and Parker and make the right decision.
I'll go ahead and make this prediction right now. Parker will embarrass the state like Moore did and I'll be surprised if he survives his term. I'll also predict that under his leadership as chief justice the state of Alabama will be sued and we'll have to spend money we don't have to defend him.
To be honest I haven't looked through enough totals to see if we'll have any runoffs on the Escambia County ballot, but there will be some across the state. Those runoffs will be set for July 17 and if you think voter turnout was low Tuesday, you've seen nothing yet.
Just a reminder (and I'll remind you again), if you voted in the Republican Primary, you can't vote in the Democratic runoff and if you voted in the Democratic Primary, you can't vote in the Republican runoff.
I scratch my head every election year about the lack of concern over voting. I always remember that we hold primaries a week or so after we honor the many men and women who died to give us that right. Obviously the majority of us simply don't care.
We don't care until political decisions made by the people that a minority of the people put in office start hitting our pocketbooks. Then we want to yell and shout and complain. I still believe, if you don't vote, you have no right to complain.
I write a variation of this column every two years and I ask people who didn't vote to let me know why they didn't. I don't get many responses but the one I get the most is 'my one vote doesn't count'. You are so, so wrong.
I've covered races in this county that were settled by two votes. When I was in Fayetteville, Tenn., an incumbent council member lost by two votes and had three voting-age children who decided to go fishing instead of voting.
I haven't missed an opportunity to vote since I turned 18. My mother is 85 years old and she's never missed an election. I covered another story when I worked in Fayetteville about a 101-year old man who lived Lynchburg down the road (home of Jack Daniel's whiskey) and he died the day after the election after casting his absentee ballot. I had done some stories on him before and his children told me he 'willed' himself to vote that last time and was worried that his vote wouldn't count if he died before election day. He was a military veteran and his family told me when I wrote about his death that once he voted he was ready to die – they said they saw it in his eyes.
So, again I'll put this out there. Why didn't you vote? You can send me a letter to P.O. Box 1916, Flomaton, Ala., 36441; email me at [email protected]; call me at 251-296-3491 or simply stop by the office.
I don't need to scratch any more hair out of my head wondering why people don't exercise the greatest right our forefathers fought to give us.
