Voter turnout was low Tuesday in most of Forsyth County's municipal elections, except in Clemmons, where voters turned out to strike down a street-improvement bond package.
Voters cast ballots in seven Forsyth municipalities — Bethania, Clemmons, Kernersville, Lewisville, Rural Hall, Tobaccoville and Walkertown.
The voter turnout was 12.6 percent. That means that of the 43,992 voters eligible to vote, 5,543 cast ballots, according to complete but unofficial results from the Forsyth County Board of Elections.
Rob Coffman, the director of the Board of Elections, said Tuesday night that voter turnout is usually about 15 percent in municipal elections.
"We are kind of in the low end of the spectrum," Coffman said. "People were not excited about the issues except in Clemmons for the bond issue."
Voters in Clemmons rejected the bond referendum by a vote of 2,222 to 514, complete but unofficial results showed.
Voter turnout in towns throughout Northwest North Carolina was higher than in Forsyth County. About 25 percent of the registered voters in nine other counties in the region cast ballots, election statistics showed.
Turnout statewide also was low overall, with 11.6 percent of registered voters casting ballots. According to the N.C. State Board of Elections, about 492,561 ballots were cast among the state's 4.24 million registered voters.
Several large cities had mayoral elections.
In Greensboro, Robbie Perkins defeated Mayor Bill Knight. Perkins received 20,965 votes — or 57 percent — while Knight received 15,795 votes — or 43 percent — according to unofficial results.
Democratic incumbent Anthony Foxx held a more than 2-to-1 lead over Republican challenger Scott Stone in the Charlotte mayor's race. With totals counted from 139 of 168 precincts, Foxx had 56,126 votes — 66.7 percent — compared with 26,958 — or 33.2 percent — for Stone.
Foxx will lead the state's largest city as it hosts the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
In Durham, Mayor Bill Bell was headed for a seventh term, taking a huge lead over the Rev. Sylvester Williams.
With most precincts reporting Tuesday night, Fayetteville Mayor Tony Chavonne was on his way to a fourth term in office.
In the most closely watched of North Carolina's local elections, a Democratic-aligned candidate kept his seat on the Wake County school board, completing a sweep of the seats up for grabs this year.
Incumbent Kevin Hill beat challenger Heather Losurdo by nearly 1,000 votes Tuesday. The result means Democrats will have a 5-4 majority on the board governing North Carolina's largest school district.
It could also mean a change in direction for the board, which decided last year to scrap a decade-old busing plan aimed at making sure schools didn't become too heavily identified as either poor or rich.
Hill voted against that decision but has said he would make changes to the replacement system instead of returning to the old program.
The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, saluted Hill's election and said he hopes that the Wake school board would provide a diverse education to students rather than adopting policies that would resegregate public schools.
"Once again, blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, old and young, rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats have all said, 'We want to go forward and not backwards,' " Barber said in a statement.
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