Three Races Heading to Runoff

Updated Wednesday morning

All of Paulding County’s voting precincts are set to be open on Aug. 21, as three races will be decided by runoffs.

Opening all the precincts will be the race for Paulding County’s chief magistrate. Martin Valbuena led the pack throughout Tuesday night’s election results but did not reach the 50-percent-plus-one-vote threshold to earn the outright win. The incumbent pulled 6,499 votes, good for 47.1 percent of the total.

Dan Collins will be Valbuena’s opponent for earning the second-highest vote total. His 3,404 votes put him at 24.7 percent to Freddy Henderson’s 14.9 percent and Brian Hardison’s 13.2 percent. (See videos of the chief magistrate candidates and .)

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Impacting a few of the precincts will be State Senate District 31 and State House District 66. In the former, incumbent Bill Heath will again square off against Bill Carruth. Voters in Paulding, Haralson and Polk counties gave more favor to Heath, but his 45.3-percent share of the vote was not enough to stave off the runoff; Carruth took 41.1 percent of votes while J.K. Rogers earned 13.6 percent of the ballots.

House District 66 includes only one Paulding precinct, and more than half of the voters who came out to that polling place favored Bob Snelling. But Snelling overall had 49.6 percent of the vote; his two opponents, Michael “Mike” Miller and Mickey Thompson, took 27.2 and 23.2 percent, respectively. Miller’s second-place finish puts him in the runoff with Snelling. (See video of all three candidates and .)

All three runoff elections will be held Tuesday, Aug. 21, at the polling precincts affected by the races—all county voters will see the chief magistrate race on the ballot, while only those in the affected legislative districts will cast ballots in those races. To be able to vote in these elections, county voters must have cast Republican or nonpartisan ballots in the primary.

Early and advance voting for these races will be Aug. 13-17 at the .

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