Coleman defeats Porter in judicial runoff

November 24, 2010

By BRIAN HAWKINS
sdneditor@bellsouth.net

It looks like long-time West Point attorney Lee Coleman will become the third judge for the 16th Circuit Court District.
Coleman faced fellow West Point attorney Nebra Porter in a runoff election on Tuesday after neither won a majority of the votes in the Nov. 2 general election to win the Place 3 Circuit Court judgeship outright.
According to results reported to area television stations with all 67 polling precincts in Oktibbeha, Clay, Lowndes and Noxubee counties reporting, Coleman is the unofficial winner over Nebra Porter by a vote 8,324 to 6,676.
Results of the race are unofficial until certified by the election commissions in each county today.
The certification process includes the counting of any affidavit ballots cast.
In Oktibbeha County, Coleman received 2,047 votes to Porter’s 1,660.
The Oktibbeha County Election Commission still has 14 affidavit ballots to verify and count during the certification process today.
Including 233 absentee ballots cast over the last two weeks, a total of 3,743 of the county’s 24,792 active registered voters went to the polls Tuesday for a voter turnout of 15.1 percent.
Circuit Clerk Angie McGinnis had predicted that 25 percent of the more than 11,000 registered voters — around 2,750 people — who went to the polls in the Nov. 2 general election would vote in Tuesday’s runoff.
The runoff results show that around 33 percent of those who voted Nov. 2 retruend to vote on Tuesday.
With his victory on Tuesday, Coleman joins incumbent judges Jim Kitchens (Place 1) and Lee Howard (Place 2) on the bench.
All three will be sworn in around the beginning of the new year.