Paulding Voters Give Gingrich the Green Light

Though Paulding County’s election results weren’t completely tabulated until nearly three and a half hours after the polls closed, it didn’t take long to see how county voters were leaning. Throughout the night, each voting precinct’s results showed that more than half of Paulding residents that headed to the polls favored Newt Gingrich in the Republican race for the White House. (See the recap of last night’s live blog from the county’s elections office.)

None of the 14 precincts had Gingrich pulling less than 50 percent of their voters. When the final totals were released just before 10:30 p.m., the candidate had earned 7,949 votes—55.4 percent of the ballots that went to GOP candidates.

Gingrich has been no stranger to Paulding in recent times. Last year, he was at the . His daughter, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, weeks prior to her father's keynote for the Paulding organization.

Placing second in Paulding on Tuesday was Rick Santorum, whose 3,011 votes gave him 21 percent. Mitt Romney was third in the county results with 2,466 ballots, or 17.2 percent. Ron Paul was a distant fourth at 860 votes and 6 percent.

Local voters also had the chance to vote for other GOP candidates who had dropped out in the weeks and months prior. Rick Perry led the remaining five candidates with 21 votes, followed by Michele Bachmann at 18, Buddy Roemer at eight, Jon Huntsman at seven and Gary Johnson at five.

On the Democratic side, President Barack Obama, the sole candidate on the ballot, earned 514 votes from Paulding voters.

The election summary reports are attached to this article.

Paulding’s results helped propel Gingrich to a win in the Peach State. As of early Wednesday morning, Newt Gingrich had 47.4 percent of the vote statewide, compared to Romney’s 25.7 percent and Santorum’s 19.6 percent, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In all, 14,896 of Paulding’s 72,402 voters cast ballots Tuesday or during early or advance voting—a turnout of 20.6 percent.

“We would’ve liked more,” said Deidre Holden, supervisor of . “I think it would’ve been higher if we would have had more local races and if there had been more Democratic candidates on the ballot.

“I’m glad that the voters got out and voted, and I just hope they show up in higher numbers in July and November,” she added.

In other local election action, after winning Tuesday’s special election to fill the office . Devey edged out former city councilman Don Brown by 13 votes .