A failed Georgia Senate candidate dropped her court challenge of the results from May’s primary election, which she narrowly lost to the chamber’s Democratic leader.
During a hearing at Fulton County Superior Court on Tuesday, lawyers for Sabrina McKenzie asked the judge to dismiss the case.
McKenzie, an ordained minister from Stone Mountain who teaches liturgical dance and calls herself the "dancing preacher," filed a lawsuit over the summer requesting a new election. She claimed that people were allowed to vote after state law requires polls to close, that some voters got the wrong ballots and that the provisional ballot tally was questionable.
She was challenging the results of her contest with Senate Minority Leader Steve Henson, D-Stone Mountain,which she lost by 111 votes, according to official results from the Secretary of State's Office. A recount requested by McKenzie in June upheld the May result.
Shortly before the hearing was scheduled to begin, McKenzie informed her lawyers she wanted to dismiss the case.
McKenzie was suing the DeKalb County Board of Voter Registration and Elections and its director, Erica Hamilton, as well as Henson and Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is in charge of overseeing the state’s elections. All had asked that the case be dismissed.
Henson said he was glad the case wasn’t moving forward.
“I knew it would be dismissed,” he said. “It had no merit whatsoever.”
Henson has served in the Senate for 24 years, first spending eight years in the chamber before leaving in 1998 to run unsuccessfully for labor commissioner. He returned in 2002 and has been the Senate’s Democratic leader since 2011.
This year was the first time Henson had been challenged in an election since returning to the Senate in 2002.
Henson will win the general election and return to the Senate next year since no Republican is running in the contest.
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