Waynesboro: Why did 1,505 people leave the At-Large line blank on their ballots?

Republican nominee Jeremy Sloat won the At-Large seat on Waynesboro City Council in Tuesday’s election – assuming the two Republicans on the electoral board follow the court order to certify the vote – by 439 votes.

Gotta wonder how close former mayor Bobby Henderson would have gotten if the 1,505 people who voted in other races on the Nov. 5 ballot hadn’t left the line for the At-Large seat blank.

Isn’t that weird, that 1,505 people – 13.6 percent of the total of 11,089 who voted in the 2024 elections in the city – just left that space blank?

You go out to vote, and you leave that space blank.

Why?

There were only 473 undervotes on the constitutional amendment question, which got no pub ahead of the election – it’s my job to know these things, and that one caught me by surprise.

I bring that up to make the point, it wasn’t necessarily just, hey, we didn’t know anything about the At-Large race.

The bulk of the undervotes came from early voters – 873 of the early ballots didn’t include a filled-in oval for either Sloat or Henderson, according to Lisa Jeffers, the Waynesboro voting registrar, on Election night.

Doing the math, Henderson would have needed to win the votes of 64.4 percent of the undervoters to surpass Sloat in the final count, and that’s a big ask.

And of course, we can’t know how the undervoters would have split.

It’s just, I have no other word that fits here other than weird, that you’d take time out of your day to vote, and at least not write in Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, if you didn’t like either of the names on the ballot.

Come on, people.