The mayor of a small city in Georgia, along with two former election officials, has been arrested on felony charges connected to attempts last November to interrupt a local election following the disqualification of a city council candidate allied with the mayor.
Camilla Mayor Kelvin Owens was detained at the Mitchell County jail as of Friday, two days after a grand jury charged him with a felony for election interference and a misdemeanor for conspiring to commit election fraud.
Also arrested were Rhunette Williford, the city’s former elections superintendent, and Cheryl Ford, who was her former deputy and is currently serving as 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.
