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Low early voting turnout in spirited mayor's race

Early voting ends Friday. It looks like it will go out with whimper. But don’t tell the candidates that.
An Atlanta voter questions Mary Norwood about police profiling

ATLANTA -- The race for Atlanta mayor is shaping up to be a low-turnout election, based on early voting data. And the candidates for mayor have been racing to grabble up every single vote they can leading into Tuesday’s election.

Early voting ends Friday. It looks like it will go out with whimper. But don’t tell the candidates that.

When we caught up with Mary Norwood, the Atlanta city councilwoman was in high gear—and she buzzed ouit of her SW Atlanta campaign office straight into a moment of potential discomfort with a voter.

The man had asked Norwood about her appearance at a candidate forum in September at which she didn’t respond immediately to a question about racial profiling. At the southwest Atlanta shopping center, he asked her about it twice.

During her first answer, Norwood gave a detailed analysis of how her opponents had edited the exchange out of context and posted it on the internet.

"Do you recognize that white (police) officers racially profile African American men?" he asked her again. This time, Norwood was more direct. "I think we’ve got plenty of evidence of that throughout the entire country. I think we’ve all seen that. There's no question," Norwood said.

In a week that started with the stagecraft of an endorsement by US Rep. Hank Johnson for candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms, it has fallen upon voters to make sense of a mayoral ballot with eleven names and a jumble of similar themes.

"I liken it to going to a restaurant and there’s too much on the menu. Sometimes it can be overwhelming. Sometimes people like simple choices," Bottoms said in an interview.

Rhonda Gleaton cast a ballot at Adamsville – the leading early voting site in a low-turnout election. She says she cast her mayoral vote based on which candidate appeared most recently at her church.

"It was kind of hard. You have so many people out there. People calling my house, oh my god, the phone calls! I just hang up," she laughed.

78,450 people voted the last time the mayor’s seat came open in November 2009. This election, only about 16 percent of those folks had early voted as of Wednesday night.

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