Electing Not to Vote

[Tolkien R.R.J]

Here's a brief summary explaining some of the reasons why I no longer vote and the benefits of disengaging from politics.



Electing Not to Vote by Jeb Smith

Electing Not to Vote

 

[d taylor]

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I have not voted in a long time. I would vote if again a person like Ron Paul would run.

 

[eleos1954]

Here's a brief summary explaining some of the reasons why I no longer vote and the benefits of disengaging from politics.



Electing Not to Vote by Jeb Smith

Electing Not to Vote

We aren't voting for a God ... we are voting for who we think will best lead the country. Everyone should vote.

 

[timothyu]

Christians are supposed to be of the Kingdom not the world of man, but freed of it's thinking. But I understand some wishing to choose the lesser evil. Remember the concept was they were to be your servants, not those of financiers. Remind them of this. Personally I choose the 'none of the above' option to make my statement, an option that must by law be given at election times, including the recent one.

 

[Tolkien R.R.J]

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I have not voted in a long time. I would vote if again a person like Ron Paul would run.

I do hold out hope to find someone, but the whole thing is corrupt. I honestly was thinking about JFK Jr.

 

[d taylor]

I do hold out hope to find someone, but the whole thing is corrupt. I honestly was thinking about JFK Jr.

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It is not just on the national level. In the town i live in the chancery clerk did such a poor job he was removed from this position.

Since you will not be able to read the newspaper articles without being a paid subscriber i will post some here.

From The Greenwood Commonwealth

When Johnny Gary Jr. left office late last month as Leflore County’s chancery clerk, he departed owing the county treasury possibly tens of thousands of dollars.
How much is presently uncertain, since Gary has failed to file a mandatory annual financial report with the State Auditor’s Office.
That report was due April 15. The state auditor has sent Gary a letter, dated May 13, in an effort to prod him on.
If the report is not filed within 30 days of the receipt of the letter, the state auditor could institute legal proceedings against Gary, according to state law.
Should the presiding judge order Gary to comply, failure to do so could result in him being held in contempt and facing a civil penalty of up to $5,000 “for any such noncompliance that the court determines as intentional or willful,” the law reads.

Gary said he has missed the deadline because the bookkeeper with whom he had contracted to help complete the form itemizing Gary’s income and expenses during 2023 died recently.

Gary declined to name the individual, citing concerns for the family’s privacy, but the Commonwealth has learned it was Henry Luckett, whose wife, Charlie, is the chancery clerk in Holmes County. He died in early May.

“I lost a mentor, someone who has helped me from day 1,” said Gary.

He said he has contacted both the Audit Department and the state Public Employees’ Retirement System to seek guidance on how to deal with his situation. The annual report calculates not only what Gary earned above a salary cap and is supposed to turn over to the county treasury but also what he owes the state retirement system on his earnings.

Gary, who lost a court-ordered special election on April 16 to Debra Hibbler, had trouble complying for most of his tenure as chancery clerk with the state law that limits chancery clerks’ salaries.

Although he filed his reports for 2020 through 2022 on time with the state auditor, it took him several months and several installments to turn over his excess earnings to the county for the first two years.

The late payments were particularly noteworthy since he was one of the top-earning public officials in Mississippi.

After the Commonwealth brought attention to his tardiness, Gary paid the county on time last year.

The cap for chancery clerks applies only to what they make from the responsibilities they are required to perform by statute — such as their administrative duties for chancery court and keeping the minutes of the Board of Supervisors — plus what they collect in fees on deeds of trust, court filings and other documents recorded in their offices from attorneys and other outside parties.

From that income, the clerks deduct their costs, primarily the payroll expenses of employees they hire to help them perform these tasks.

The clerks get to keep the difference between their income and their expenses, up to the salary cap. When Gary first took office in 2020, the cap was $94,500. It was increased to $97,000 in 2022.

For the first three years, his net income on average exceeded the cap by more than $70,000. The lowest was his first year, when the overage was a little under $50,000.

Thus, it is probable that he owes the county a significant sum and is late once again on turning it over. The deadline for paying the county was the same as for filing the report with the state auditor.

Under another state law, to “knowingly” fail to pay by the deadline is a misdemeanor, for which conviction could bring up to six months in jail and a fine of up to double the amount that was not deposited in the county treasury.

The law, however, is rarely if ever enforced. A previous spokesman for the State Auditor’s Office said in 2022 that he was not aware of any clerk who has been prosecuted for failing to pay the overage on time.

Nor is there any provision for assessing interest or fees for tardy payments.

Although Gary has lost his elected position, he continues to hold two positions — comptroller and the person in charge of records preservation — to which he was reappointed in January by the Board of Supervisors. He earns a combined $72,000 from those two positions. He had held a third appointed position, the $41,612-a-year post of county administrator, but the board voted to strip him of that job in January over dissatisfaction with his performance.

District 1 Supervisor Sam Abraham, who voted against reappointing Gary to any positions, said Gary should have been able to get someone else to help him fill out the annual financial report.

“Right now, he’s still got county money he’s operating on. I don’t see them letting me and you operate on it,” said Abraham, who served as Leflore County’s chancery clerk for 20 years before becoming a supervisor.

Robert Collins, the president of the Board of Supervisors, said he was unaware that Gary had missed this year’s payment to the county until hearing about it from the Commonwealth. He declined to comment about the situation, other than to say that the board is legally obligated to keep Gary on staff at least through this year.

“We’ve got a contract with him,” Collins said. “We’ve got to hold the contract up.”

Abraham, though, questions how much Gary will be doing, especially when it comes to records preservation, since Gary is no longer chancery clerk.

“I don’t know what records he’s going to restore,” Abraham said.

He also said that the money allotted for records preservation — currently $48,000 — has historically been given to the chancery and circuit clerks to supplement the salaries of the employees they hired to do the work.

Although Gary declined to comment specifically on the criticism directed at him by Abraham now and in the past, he did say that he believes he has been treated unfairly, including in the news coverage about his 52 months in office.

“I have not gotten a fair shake on this,” he said.

“I’ve done all that I can for everyone that I’ve served, and I will continue to serve, God being my helper.”

He said the criticism that he regularly failed to perform his duties in a timely and accurate manner did not take into account his accomplishments, such as the $5.8 million he said the county had in the bank when he was removed as county administrator.

“I can assure you we did our job. No doubt about it,” he said.

An ordained Pentecostal minister, Gary drew an analogy with Paul the Apostle, who was shipwrecked three times, including when he was being transported to Rome with a load of other prisoners. According to the biblical account, they swam to safety on pieces of the broken-up vessel.

“I don’t have that full ship now,” he said, referring to the jobs he lost as county administrator and chancery clerk. “That’s been broken up. But with God’s help, he has allowed me to make it to land, even on broken pieces.”

He said he bears no animosity either toward the Board of Supervisors for not reappointing him as county administrator or toward Hibbler for unseating him as chancery clerk.

“I have great respect for the majority of that board,” he said. “I did not go out bashing them. I think it’s the best board we have ever had.”

He predicted that Hibbler is going to have difficulties mastering the responsibilities of an office in which she has not worked previously — the same situation he faced four years ago. Now tucked away in a small courthouse office down the hall from Hibbler’s, Gary said if she seeks his help, he will provide it.

“I’ll never reject or turn my back on her if she needs anything,” he said.

- Contact Tim Kalich

 

[d taylor]

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Then the supervisors turned around and appointed Johnny Gary jr. to the position of interim circuit clerk.

From the Greenwood Commonwealth

When the majority on the Leflore County Board of Supervisors last week decided to make Johnny Gary Jr. the interim circuit clerk, it ignored both the people’s will and Gary’s poor performance as chancery clerk and county administrator.
And it did so only days after two of the three supervisors who voted to make the appointment had discounted rumors that Gary was being considered for the job.
The citizens of this county should be perturbed.
When Gary lost a special election in April to Debra Hibbler, that vote was in part a referendum on Gary’s performance in his four-plus years in the job of chancery clerk. To say he came up lacking would be an understatement.
There were repeated problems with work not getting done or not getting done on time. He was several months late in both 2021 and 2022 in paying the county treasury what he had earned in excess of the chancery clerk’s salary cap. This year, he missed the deadline both for filing his report and paying the county. Thus, even as he is delinquent on paying the county what may be tens of thousands of dollars, he has been put into a position that could keep him earning well over $100,000 a year, if the supervisors end up tacking on the records-restoration supplement with the fee-based circuit clerk’s earnings.

And it wasn’t as if Gary only struggled with the more complicated aspects of his previous job. He failed to even handle well such a basic task as keeping the Board of Supervisors’ minutes. The backlog got so bad that the board, during Gary’s final months as chancery clerk, began paying someone else to record and prepare its minutes. They also dumped him as county administrator at the first of this year, assigning that job to longtime Tax Assessor Leroy Ware.
Those decisions by the board itself were a vote of no confidence in Gary, which was later affirmed at the ballot box by his defeat in April and confirmed by an independent audit that also was critical of Gary’s performance.
If Gary could not competently handle the job of chancery clerk, what makes the three supervisors — Robert Collins, Reginald Moore and Eric Mitchell — confident that he will do any better at circuit clerk? Yes, he worked as a deputy circuit clerk for a year and a half more than a decade ago, but it’s uncertain how well he did in that job. At least one judge who worked with Gary said there were issues with how well he kept the court’s minutes.
Maybe Gary will exceed these low expectations between now and Nov. 5, when the special election is held to permanently fill the position vacated by the death of Elmus Stockstill. But if he doesn’t, the blame will fall not only on Gary but the three supervisors who ignored an abundance of evidence — and the majority of voters — and gave him the job anyway.

 

[d taylor]

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Then finally when the election came up for circuit clerk He Johnny Gary jr ran and was voted in for circuit clerk. I mean how stupid are the voters of this county can be. This person should have gotten zero votes.

From The Greenwood Commonwealth

It has been a long year for Johnny Gary Jr., who emerged Tuesday after several setbacks as the apparent winner of the runoff election for Leflore County circuit clerk.

In January, the county Board of Supervisors declined to reappoint him as county administrator. In April, he lost his bid for a second term as chancery clerk to Debra Hibbler in a court-mandated special election. That do-over was ordered after a state judge determined that Gary’s 15-vote victory over Hibbler in the 2023 Democratic primary had been tainted by voting irregularities, including widespread voter fraud.

But Tuesday night, Gary could smile and his supporters could cheer as he was in position to be named circuit clerk for at least the next three years, removing the “interim” portion from his job title.

Gary, who has served as interim clerk since May, received 1,972 votes, or 52.3%, to Jackie Cooper Lewis’ 1,795, or 47.7%, in the counts tabulated Tuesday.

“To God be the glory,” Gary said in reaction to his presumed victory.

Lewis said after the results came in, however, that she was not immediately conceding.

The reported results include machine totals and absentee ballots but not affidavit ballots, Election Commission Chairman Preston Ratliff said.

Three election commissioners reported at least 34 affidavit ballots combined in their districts. Affidavit ballots for the remaining two districts were not immediately available, but Ratliff said Tuesday that those districts may not have any.

Affidavit ballots, which are cast by voters whose names do not appear on a precinct’s pollbooks, are being considered in the coming days by the county’s resolution board to determine their validity.

There are also mailed-out absentee ballots that may be counted up to five business days after the election, as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day.

However, Ratliff said that even with the affidavit ballots and mailed-out absentee ballots, it is unlikely that the outstanding vote will allow Lewis to make up for the 177-vote deficit. The Election Commission must certify the final results by Dec. 6.

The runoff was necessary after neither Lewis nor Gary earned a majority of votes in the Nov. 5 general election, which also featured Curressia Brown and Cedric Williams.

When Gary’s supporters realized Tuesday night that he led the race with all precincts reporting, they erupted in elation in the Circuit Clerk’s Office, where they had gathered. Gary emerged from his personal office and was congratulated by friends and family.

Gary said it was difficult to be in campaign mode while also serving the needs of the office, but he credited his supporters with helping him with the election and credited his deputy clerks with helping him serve the public.

He said he has plans for more trainings, more transparency and more visibility for the office over the next three years.

“We realize that we’ve got a lot of people that think differently than what we think, but we’re not going to let that deter us,” he said. “We’re here for service.”

On election night, though, Gary said he was mostly ready to celebrate. “I’m just thankful. I’m relieved, too. I just want to sit down and eat a bologna sandwich and get me something cold to drink and just hug my family and talk with them for a little bit.”

Lewis, who represents District 5 on the Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School Board, said she will exercise her right to review the ballots and ballot boxes.

“I just think that we’ll run across something. I’m not sure what, but I just have a feeling deep down within that I need to contest it. But we’ll view the boxes, and I’ll take my guidance from my attorney.”

Lewis said she intends to schedule her inspection for next week.

The winner of the election will complete the term of the late Elmus Stockstill, who died shortly after he was reelected to a fourth term last year. The term concludes in 2027.

- Contact Kevin Edwards

 

[lifepsyop]

Christians should either go Amish and fully separate or fully embrace their political power.

It's this hanging around in between, playing good little atomized liberals, while degenerate and evil coalitions slowly gain more and more influence over all of society, that is really annoying, cowardly, embarrassing, and wrong.

To see how lawless things have become is astonishing and the Boomer Christian leaders have no idea how to handle it, just sticking their heads in the sand and pretending it's still the 1980's.