Republican runoff election is May 30

Republican Candidate William “Bill” Caudill has called for a runoff election after he came within 5 percent of nearest challenger Sandy Carter Herndon.

The runoff election will be held on May 30, with all polling places open from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. The one stop voting period will begin on May 18 from 8 a.m.until 5 p.m. and end on May 27, when it will run from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m.

On the Republican ticket, there were four candidates for county commission vying for three spots on the fall ballot.

In the final results that were reported in the canvass signed by the board on Monday, Eldon Edwards was the top vote-getter with 434 votes (32 percent) and Doug Murphy (30 percent) was second with 404. Coming in third and fourth were Herndon with 288 votes (21 percent), and Caudill with 221 votes (16 percent). A candidate who fails to earn a seat but is still within 10 percent of his or her nearest challenger may call for a runoff.

Caudill said one of his reasons for calling for the runoff was a problem experienced by some unaffiliated voters at the Cranberry Precinct. “I felt like I should have had and would have had more votes if the polls had done things in a different way,” said Caudill. “One of them was my wife,” he said, noting that she was told she could not vote in the Republican primary because she was registered unaffiliated. Board of Elections Chairman Ed Adams confirmed the problem, noting that about five unafilliated voters in the Cranberry Precinct were indeed not given a proper choice of ballots when attempting to vote.

Those voters should have been allowed to choose among any of three choices in voting in the primary: Democrat, Republican or non-partisan. However, those voters were only offered the non-partisan ballot in error.

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