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Two candidates wage write-in campaigns
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Published: November 3, 2009
Updated: 11/03/2009 12:10 am
Today is Election Day and two South Ward residents are waging write-in campaigns against Molly Leight, the Winston-Salem City Council member who has held the South Ward's seat for the last four years.
Democrat Carolyn Highsmith and Republican Nathan Jones spent the weekend working with volunteers, calling prospective voters, and canvassing neighborhoods in the South Ward, working last-minute to persuade voters to write their names in on ballots for the council.
Leight, a Democrat, has served on the council the last four years. She beat Democrat Wesley Hudson in the September Democratic primary. She said that, after the primary, many of her volunteers went to work for the campaigns of council members Dan Besse and Wanda Merschel, also Democrats. She said when she found out about the write-in campaigns, she called her volunteers back in.
"We've been doing some phone calls, we'll be out waving some signs," she said. "Really, it's a matter of getting the vote out."
Earlier this year, Jones helped organize the Winston-Salem "tea parties" -- rallies that protested taxes and the federal stimulus bill. He was annexed into the city in 2006.
Jones, 36, of Darwick Road said he waited until the weekend to start campaigning because he was waiting to see if someone else would run against Leight.
"Honestly, it's not something that I've had a long desire to be on (the city council)," he said. "It's more of an issue that no one else has stepped up and I felt like if no one else was going to do it -- we can all sit back and complain that no one stands up and takes on the issues. It's so easy to complain about that and very few people are stepping up to do something about it."
Jones owns Salem Benefits Group, a company that helps other companies with employee benefits. He said that, if he were to win the election, he would focus on cutting waste from the city budget.
Jones also said that property taxes need to be lower.
"From someone who has been annexed, that's an issue for me," he said. "We see our property taxes double, we really don't see an increased level of services for that property-tax increase, so the natural inclination for people in that position is to begin to believe that there has to be a tremendous amount of waste."
Highsmith, 56, of Anderson Drive started organizing her neighborhood to fight gang activity and graffiti earlier this year.
Highsmith said she was not running as an "anti-Molly Leight" candidate.
She said she decided to wage a write-in campaign because neighbors and others in her community asked her to.
She said her campaign is a "protest" against gang activity, graffiti and youth violence in neighborhoods around schools in the South Ward.
"I am mainly allowing my community to use me to protest their concerns -- their anxiety about the social and economic and criminal forces that have just been pervading us in the last two years," she said.
"We want to show the political system in Winston-Salem that we really are a small but vibrant political force in this little community that we have, and we wanted to see if we could have some political muscle."
lgraff@wsjournal.com
727-7279
Election Day
Polls will open at 6:30 a.m. and close at 7:30 p.m.
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