SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — The mayor of a small city in Georgia and two former election officials have been jailed on felony charges stemming from efforts last November to halt a local election after one of the mayor’s allies was disqualified from a city council race.
Camilla Mayor Kelvin Owens was being held at the Mitchell County jail Friday, two days after a grand jury indicted him on a felony charge of election interference and a misdemeanor count of conspiring to commit election fraud.
Also jailed were the city’s former elections superintendent, Rhunette Williford; and her former deputy superintendent, Cheryl Ford, who is currently Camilla’s city clerk. They were charged with the same crimes as the mayor, plus misdemeanor counts of failing to perform their duties as public officers.
Chaos roiled special elections for a pair of city council seats in Camilla last November amid a long-running legal battle over local politics in the town, a farming community of about 5,000 people in rural southwest Georgia.
The case revolved around Venterra Pollard, a city council member removed from office last summer after a judge ruled he wasn’t a Camilla resident. Pollard ran to regain the position in the fall special election. Another judge ordered Pollard disqualified and ruled that votes for him should be discarded. In addition, the city was ordered to post signs saying votes for Pollard wouldn’t be counted.
On Nov. 4, the day before Election Day, both Williford and Ford quit as the city’s two top elections officials. Their joint resignation letter blamed “mental duress, stress and coercion experienced by recent court decisions regarding our role in elections.”
Owens, citing his emergency powers as mayor, moved swiftly to halt the city’s elections. Signs posted at City Hall and a notice on Facebook declared the election was canceled. Polling places were closed to both poll workers and voters in the morning.
The elections were held, albeit several hours behind schedule, after Superior Court Judge Heather Lanier appointed new supervisors to oversee the voting and ordered polls to remain open until nearly 4 a.m. Elections for president, Congress and other offices weren’t affected.
Mayor Owens had blamed the local upheaval on racial politics, saying that Pollard, who is Black, was targeted by white residents trying to wrest power from the majority Black population. The city of Camilla is nearly three-fourths Black.
The Georgia NAACP said in a statement on Facebook that it was “deeply alarmed” by the allegations of election interference as well as the arrests of Owens and the two former election officials, all of whom are Black.
“We were shocked that there were indictments,” said Gerald Griggs, president of the Georgia NAACP. “We are still in a fact-finding mode to see what actually happened.”
All three defendants remained in jail awaiting a hearing Monday. It was not immediately known if any of them had attorneys who could speak for them. Messages seeking comment were left at two phone numbers for Owens. The Associated Press could not find working phone numbers for Williford or Ford.
District Attorney Joe Mulholland, whose circuit includes Camilla, declined to comment on the indictment Friday.
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