A Georgia election with few voters: Turnout is 'miserably low' in the race for utility regulator

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A Georgia election with few voters: Turnout is 'miserably low' in the race for utility regulator

2025-07-10 04:50 Last Updated At：05:01

ATLANTA (AP) — Every time the door swings open this week at the county courthouse in the tiny south Georgia town of Statenville, six election workers have a moment to hope that someone is coming to vote.

“Anybody that comes in pretty much has to walk by our office," said Renee Church, the elections supervisor in Echols County.

But through noon on Wednesday, none of those passersby had voted in the runoff to choose either Peter Hubbard or Keisha Waites as the Democratic nominee for a seat on Georgia’s Public Service Commission.

Welcome to a statewide election where almost nobody came.

Through the first two of five days of early in-person voting, only 9,822 ballots were accepted. That's 0.13% of active voters, what Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, called “miserably low turnout.”

Early in-person voting runs through Friday, with the election day set for Tuesday. Anyone can vote, except for the more than 63,000 people who voted in Republican primaries on June 17 including one in which incumbent Tim Echols beat GOP challenger Lee Muns.

Waites was the top vote-getter in a June 17 Democratic primary, but didn't get a majority. That meant she had to face the second-place finisher, Hubbard, in a runoff to determine the party nominee. Barring an upswell in voter numbers, fewer than 1% of Georgia's 7.4 million active voters could cast ballots. The winner will go on to face Republican incumbent Fitz Johnson in November.

Despite the low turnout, Hubbard and Waites continue to push, telling voters that breaking the Republican hold on the five-member body will mean a difference in their electric bills. The commission sets rates and oversees generation plans for Georgia Power, which serves 2.3 million customers statewide. Customers have seen bills rise six times in recent years, and a typical Georgia Power residential customer now pays more than $175 a month, including taxes.

“If you don’t like the direction your power bills are going, then you have a choice. You could do something about it,” Hubbard said Wednesday.

A green energy advocate, Hubbard touts his experience testifying before the commission and developing alternative plans that emphasize a shift toward solar power stored in batteries, rather than building more natural gas plants.

“A vote for Peter Hubbard is a vote to put a commissioner on the Public Service Commission who brings deep experience, who can hit the ground running with novel ideas to drive down power prices while inviting economic growth to our state,” he said.

Waites, a former state House member and former Atlanta City Council member, emphasizes that she would give representation to Black people and Democrats on the commission. In a statement Wednesday, Waites said her previous experience in office would help her “work with utility companies, legislators, and stakeholders to secure fair rates.”

“I plan to lower energy bills by advocating for increased transparency in utility rate-setting, promoting competition within the energy sector, and prioritizing clean, renewable energy sources to reduce dependence on fossil fuels,” Waites said in the statement.

It’s not like the low turnout is a surprise. Only about 140,000 people cast ballots in the June 17 Democratic primary, about 2% of voters statewide. Many Republican-leaning counties had less than 1% turnout in the Democratic primary, allowing them to activate a rarely used state law to consolidate early-voting and election day polling places to one location. A total of 76 counties triggered that clause to save money, according to the secretary of state’s office.

Officials in Walton County, east of Atlanta, predict they would have spent $42,000 to operate three early voting locations and 16 election day precincts. Cutting back to only one of each, Assistant Elections Director Lisa Clark said the runoff will now cost $5,600 in a county where only 21 of nearly 79,000 active voters had cast ballots through Tuesday.

“When it comes to public service commissioner, people don’t even know what a public service commissioner is or what they do," Clark said. "So we were not surprised. We were hopeful it would have been bigger, but we were not surprised.”

Echols isn't the only one of Georgia's 159 counties without voters in the early going. Also recording no ballots in the first two days were Chattahoochee, Clay, Glascock, Miller and Telfair counties, while seven other counties recorded one vote. But Brittany Reynolds, the election supervisor in southwest Georgia's Clay County, said Wednesday that turnout will rise there.

“I do know we will have at least one vote at the end of the day because I plan on voting myself," Reynolds said.

A fire in an Swiss ski resort bar has left about 40 people dead

CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland (AP) — Axel Clavier felt like he was suffocating inside the Swiss Alpine bar where moments before he'd been ringing in the new year with friends and dozens of other revelers.

The 16-year-old from Paris escaped the inferno, which broke out after midnight Thursday, by forcing a window open with a table. But about 40 other partygoers died, including one of Clavier's friends, falling victim to one of the worst tragedies in Switzerland's history.

The blaze also injured about 115 people, most of them seriously, as it ripped through the crowded Le Constellation bar at the ski resort of Crans-Montana, police said.

Clavier told The Associated Press that “two or three” of his friends remained missing hours after the disaster.

Valais Canton police commander Frédéric Gisler said during a news conference that work is underway to identify the victims and inform their families, adding that the community is “devastated.”

Authorities did not immediately have an exact count of the deceased.

Beatrice Pilloud, Valais Canton attorney general, said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire.

“At no moment is there a question of any kind of attack,” Pilloud said.

She later said the number of people who were in the bar is “unknown,” and its maximum capacity will be part of the investigation.

“For the time being, we don’t have any suspects,” she added, when asked if anyone had been arrested over the fire. “An investigation has been opened, not against anyone, but to better understand the circumstances of this dramatic fire.”

Clavier, the Parisian teenager, said he didn’t see the fire start, but did see waitresses arrive with Champagne bottles with burning sparklers. He lost his jacket, shoes, phone and bank card while fleeing, but “I am still alive and it’s just stuff.”

“I’m still in shock,” he added.

Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.

One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door.

Another witness speaking to BFMTV described people smashing windows to escape the blaze, some gravely injured, and panicked parents rushing to the scene in cars to see whether their children were trapped inside. The young man said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames and likened what he saw to a horror movie as he watched from across the street.

“This evening should have been a moment of celebration and coming together, but it turned into a nightmare,” said Mathias Reynard, head of the regional government of the Valais Canton.

Crans-Montana is less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Sierre, where 28 people, including many children, were killed when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a Swiss tunnel in 2012.

In a region busy with tourists skiing on the slopes, the authorities have called on the local population to show caution in the coming days to avoid accidents that could further strain the area's already overwhelmed medical resources.

With high-altitude ski runs rising around 3,000 meters (nearly 9,850 feet) in the heart of the Valais region's snowy peaks and pine forests, Crans-Montana is one of the top venues on the World Cup circuit. The resort will host the best men’s and women’s downhill racers, including Lindsey Vonn, for their final events before the Milan-Cortina Olympics in February. The town's Crans-sur-Sierre golf club stages the European Masters each August on a picturesque course.

Swiss President Guy Parmelin, speaking on his first day in the largely ceremonial job, said many emergency staff had been “confronted by scenes of indescribable violence and distress.”

“This Thursday must be the time of prayer, unity and dignity,” he said. “Switzerland is a strong country not because it is sheltered from drama, but because it knows how to face them with courage and a spirit of mutual help.”

Dazio reported from Berlin and Leicester reported from Paris. Geir Moulson in Berlin and Graham Dunbar in Geneva contributed to this report.