A recall application for Commissioner Catherine McKnight will be the focus of a special meeting Friday morning.
The Richmond County Board of Elections Office has scheduled a special called meeting for 10 a.m. March 4 with an agenda to “verify and determine legal sufficiency of the Recall Application for Catherine Smith McKnight District 3.”
Elections Executive Director Travis Doss said the application was returned on Monday, Feb. 28. It lists the chairperson as Charlotte Monique Braswell.
Braswell announced her intention to request McKnight be recalled Feb. 23 during a heated news conference called to condemn the redistricting map drawn up by state Senators Max Burns (R-District 23) and Lee Anderson (R-District 24).
The 2020 census shows Richmond County population grew by 3% to 206,607 residents. That means the ideal, balanced district size is 25,825. However, District 3, represented by Catherine McKnight, grew by more than 21% and now has 31,316 residents.
The Burns-Anderson map, signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp, removes precinct 309 from District 3 and moves it into District 5, currently represented by Commission Pres. Pro Tem Bobby Williams.
Braswell blamed McKnight for not fighting to keep the precinct in her district.
“Precinct 309 is what got Miss McKnight elected. We call, we did everything we could to only be stabbed in the back by Miss McKnight,” said Monique Braswell. “At this time, I am calling for a recall on Commissioner McKnight. I’m calling for a recall. It takes only 100 signatures to get started and know that I’ve gotten started already.”
McKnight was not a member of the Richmond County Ad Hoc Redistricting Committee that voted to send the Augusta Commission and Richmond County School Board a draft map that was drawn by the Legislative and Congressional Reapportionment Office in Atlanta without local input.
In the end, both the commission and school board voted to send that map to the legislature for approval. The vote in both bodies was 6-to-4 and broke along racial lines.
During a Jan. 6 meeting between the Augusta Commission and members of the local legislative delegation Burns announced he would not support that map.
“I have nothing to do with any of this stuff. And I’m tired of it being pointed at me when I have zero to do. Sorry my district’s too crowded. I can’t help it’s too crowded. You know, people want to stir up drama and I know this is politics, but this isn’t doing our county any good,” McKnight said.
Georgia has a three-step process to recall an elected official.
The first step is the application process. The official form is provided to election superintendents by the Secretary of State. The application must include the name and address of the person to be recalled. It must also have the signatures of the sponsors along with their addresses and county of residence and the date it was signed.
Step two is the petition process. Each person who signs the petition must be registered to vote and eligible to vote in the recall election and live in the district of the elected official being recalled. The petition requires the signatures of at least 100 of the active, registered voters from the official’s last election.
Once the application is received, the elections office has five days to verify the signatures and determine if the application is legally sufficient.
If the application is legally sufficient, the process moves to the final step, the recall election.
The call must be published within 10 days of the application being declared sufficient. The recall election must be held in no less than 30 days, or more than 45 days after the call.
If a recall petition is found to be insufficient, no further applications can be issued for six months from the date of the finding of insufficiency.
Doss said Braswell tried to withdraw the application, but the law does not allow an application to be withdrawn once it has been submitted to the elections office.
The March 4 meeting will be held in the Linda Beazley Room of the Municipal Building on Greene Street.
Dana Lynn McIntyre is a general assignment reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach her at dana@theaugustapress.com
