Randy Howard resigned October 3rd. He gave the following statement about his resignation.
“I’ve had the honor to have been able to work with a lot of great people. The challenges have been hard. We’ve had a lot of elections in the last few years since I came on board in 2019, with representative Ryan leaving, with the death of Senator Kirk, with the death of commissioner Reid and the other elections, of course with President Trump and Biden it was really hard. But my staff stuck by us through thick and thin. I probably [have] some of the best poll managers and poll workers and office staff and absentee ballot workers anywhere in Georgia. They are very honest and they try to make the voters feel like their votes carry, and they are transparent. Most of them are retirees, close to retirees. But I do not like my people being mistreated or talked down to. You cannot please a certain person no matter what you do, whether you are taking minutes or whether you are doing anything. There are a lot of things that are happening that I think could cause the county, especially the Board of elections as well as the county, some problems, and one of them is that the attorney is not there. The Board of Elections chairman has decided we don’t need an attorney there, she can handle it. That is very dangerous. We have two great county attorneys, Kimberly Reid and Hayden Hooks who are very smart and very good at what they do.
We’ve had a good relationship with everybody in the county. It takes the county itself to run the election. An election [doesn’t] operate by itself. You have to have a good working relationship with everybody and every office in the county and the cities too. We have a good working relationship with our city clerks. All you have to do is take one person trying to kill the morale. So I stepped down, and after this I will make a presentation with some other findings to the county commissioners. If you go into executive session, you got to state why you are going into executive session, if for personal matters or litigation, you got to have attorneys there to make sure you don’t go past what you are supposed to be saying or go off start talking about something else. You got to have an attorney there, whether you want them or not, no matter how much it costs. I will eventually give an initial report to the county commissioners.”