Rep. Chris Erwin finally won a seat in the Georgia legislature after a chaotic campaign in which a judge threw out the first election and ordered the vote to be redone in December. Now a court has ruled that illegal votes tainted the second election, removing Erwin from office Friday less than a month after he was sworn in and ordering him to run for the job a third time.
“It’s frustrating, I won’t say any different,” said Erwin, who’s already seeing signs of do-over deja vu in his district. “I drove to the dentist this morning and I rode by and noticed three of my campaign signs had been put out already.”
Erwin and the fellow Republican he thought he had defeated twice last year, former state Rep. Dan Gasaway, are heading for a third showdown at the polls in state House District 28 in northeast Georgia. That’s after a judge found illegal votes tainted both the initial GOP primary last May as well as the special do-over election held Dec. 4.
Superior Court Judge David Sweat ordered Friday that a new election be scheduled for April 9. His order also stripped Erwin from office, likely for the remainder of the legislature’s 40-day session that started in January.
It’s yet another example of problems Georgia voters faced at the polls in 2018. In some cities, voters had to wait two hours or more to cast ballots Nov. 6. Pending lawsuits accuse Georgia officials of enforcing strict voter ID rules and other policies that violated citizens’ voting rights. Meanwhile, state officials are working to replace paperless electronic voting machines that security experts have warned are vulnerable to hackers.