The race for Alamance County’s sheriff got off to a bit of a false start when voters went to the polls for last Tuesday’s municipal elections.
Although the office of sheriff doesn’t technically come up for a vote until 2026, the jockeying for this post has already begun as incumbent Terry Johnson prepares to face fellow Republicans Billy Clayton and Dana Byrd Pasour in next year’s spring primary.
In anticipation of this three-way contest, yard signs for Johnson and Clayton have already begun to pop up in area yards, where they’ve sometimes shared space with municipal candidates whose names actually appeared on last Tuesday’s ballot.
Dawn Hurdle, Alamance County’s elections director, insists that there’s nothing illegal about the premature display of signs in the sheriff’s race, as long as they remain on private property. Hurdle added however that the presence of these signs discombobulated quite a few voters about the races on November’s ballot.
“People saw the sheriff’s signs and thought the sheriff was on the ballot,” she recalled, “had a lot of angry voters who came in to vote in the sheriff’s race.”
Hurdle said that the first indications of this confusion cropped up during the early voting period ahead of last Tuesday’s election. She added that, in an attempt to stave off further mix-ups, her office had issued placards to all of the precincts that were activated on Election Day to let voters know the office of sheriff wasn’t at stake.
Hurdle conceded that it proved somewhat harder to get the message across in rural precincts which lie outside the bounds of any incorporated city or town.
“We had an issue with a couple of precincts that were not open on Tuesday,” she added. “At one precinct, we had a line of, like, 10 people who wanted to vote in the sheriff’s race.”
