The only partisan local offices within Bulloch County up for election this year are three seats on the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners. In a change from recent years, local Democratic and Republican candidates are qualifying this week at separate locations.

Meanwhile, the Bulloch County Board of Elections and Registration staff, at Suite 201 of the Bulloch County Annex, 113 N. Main St., Statesboro, is handling qualifying for local nonpartisan offices, which include four seats on the Bulloch County Board of Education as well as the judgeship of the Bulloch County State Court.

Qualifying opened statewide at 9 a.m. Monday, March 7, 2022, for the May 24 elections, which will include both the Democratic and Republican primaries and the nonpartisan general election. Locally, the opportunity to qualify continues 8 a.m.–5 p.m. daily through Thursday, and then from 8 a.m. until noon Friday, which is the statewide deadline.

Any candidate wanting to run as a Democrat for one of the commission seats will need to qualify with the Bulloch County Democratic Committee in a room across the lobby from the Board of Elections office inside the County Annex. But any commission candidate planning to run as a Republican must qualify at the Bulloch County Republican Party headquarters, 24 Joe Kennedy Blvd., Unit 3, which is behind Ogeechee Technical College in the Lewis Color office complex, in the righthand building with the small crepe myrtle tree in front.

“The Republican Party, they’re going to do their qualifying at their headquarters,” Bulloch County Election Supervisor Shontay Jones said last week. “I extended an offer of space to both parties. The Democratic Party took me up on that offer, so they’re going to do their qualifying here.”

Commission seats

The county commission seats available to both parties are the same, of course — Seat 1-B, currently held by Anthony Simmons; Seat 2-B, currently held by Walter Gibson; and Seat 2-D, currently held by Timmy Rushing. The qualifying fee for any of these seats is $225.

As of 5 p.m. Monday, the one Republican qualifier was Toby Conner for commission Seat 2-B, and a party spokesperson said Gibson was still expected to qualify. The one Democratic qualifier Monday was Simmons, the Seat 1-B incumbent.

For commission seats, the entire county is divided into just two large districts, and candidates for either Seat 2-B or 2-D must be residents of District 2, but not of any particular portion of it. Likewise, candidates for Seat 1-B must be residents of District 1 but can reside anywhere within it.

Four BOE seats

But the Board of Education is different, both because it is nonpartisan and because the county is divided into eight districts for electing school board members. A candidate must reside in his or her district, and residents of that district alone elect their school board member. The Board of Education seats up for election this year are those in District 2, currently held by Mike Sparks; District 4, currently held by April Newkirk; District 5, currently held by Glennera Martin; and District 6, currently represented by Jimmy “Jay” Cook Jr.

The Georgia General Assembly recently approved revisions of the commission and school board district lines based on results of the 2020 census. The election office and parties have the new district maps available.

As of 5 p.m. Monday, Newkirk has qualified to seek re-election to her District 4 seat, and Elizabeth Williams has qualified for the District 2 seat, from which Sparks has announced he plans to retire at the end of the year.

The qualifying fee for a Board of Education seat is $72. Again, because the school board is nonpartisan, the only place for its candidates to qualify is the Board of Elections and Registration office, Bulloch County Annex, 113 N. Main St., Suite 201.

State Court judge

That is also the only place candidates can qualify for election to be judge of the Bulloch County State Court. Only lawyers who have been admitted to the practice of law for at least seven years and have lived in Georgia for at least three years can become State Court judges.

Incumbent State Court Judge Joseph Cushner, appointed by the governor in February 2020 to fill the remainder of the current term, and Statesboro-based private practice attorney Michael Classens both qualified Monday to seek the next four-year term as State Court judge. So theirs is the first confirmed in-county contest in this election.

Candidate fees are based on the salary for each office, and the fee to qualify for the full-time judgeship is much higher than for the part-time board positions. It’s $4,335.93.

The parties’ share

The political parties will not get any of that money, but each party will keep half of each $225 qualifying fee paid by its county commissioner candidates.

If the county elections office were handling qualifying for the partisan offices, the county would get to keep 75% of the fees and would have to send 25% to the appropriate state party organization for each candidate. But by handling qualifying themselves, the local party organizations get to keep 50% of the money and submit the other 50% to the county elections office, Jones explained, and provided copies of passages in state law that require this.

For more than a decade, qualifying for Bulloch County’s partisan primaries had been handled by the county elections office.

“It’s always been in the law,” Jones said. “The parties have always been able to do their qualifying, or accepting that information for those partisan seats, but the parties just decided that they wanted to do their own qualifying.”

All of the paperwork will still have to be submitted through Jones’ office for creation of ballots and to make the information available to the state, she said.

The way the funding is split is the reason the local parties are now handling their own qualifying, said Lawton Sack, communications director for the Bulloch County Republican Party.

The previous county election supervisor, Patricia Lanier Jones, had split the qualifying fees with the local parties, but after she resigned last year and took another role in the county government, county officials pointed to the state law, under which even the 25% would have gone to the state parties, Sack said. Under that arrangement, he said, the local party organizations would get nothing.

“So instead of that happening, we decided to qualify candidates ourselves so we could still keep 50 percent of the qualifying fees. ... ,” Sack said. “Typically, in one way or another we support the local candidates with that money, so in a way it goes back to them.”