Former Tennessee State Representative Joe Carr is the Republican nominee for mayor of Rutherford County.
In the May 3 primary, Carr received 6,862 votes, while Rhonda Allen came in second, receiving 6,239 votes.
The incumbent mayor, Bill Ketron, came in third and received 4,487 votes. Aaron Coffee came in a distant third place with 593 votes.
The Tennessee Star previously reported that Ketron suffered from campaign finance controversies. State auditors had previously found that there were hundreds of thousands of dollars missing from multiple campaign accounts belonging to him. In order to address the issues, he paid $135,000 for the campaign law violations. Additionally, the outgoing mayor’s daughter, Kelsey Ketron, served as campaign treasurer during a period when funds were unaccounted for.
During a previous appearance on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy, Carr said, “You know the effectiveness of going door to door, Michael, firsthand. And there is nothing a candidate or its campaign can do that can secure victory better than going door to door. And we literally knocked on thousands of doors.”
Carr added, “Those doors were targeted, likely GOP voters, because, of course, you can go to the Rutherford County Election Commission and get the database and screen that for primary voters. And that’s exactly what we did. We had a very targeted list, and that’s just the canvassing we did door-to-door. We did events, we went to places.”
Carr went on to tell Leahy that he expected to need 9,000 to 10,000 votes in order to win. Carr wound up with nearly 7,000.
In that interview, Carr also said that the two main issues in the race were the “ethical and moral conduct on the part of our elected officials, number one. And number two is the Middle Point Landfill.”
No candidate qualified to run in the Democrat primary for mayor, although there were 247 write-in votes cast.
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Aaron Gulbransen is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]. Follow Aaron on GETTR, Twitter, and Parler.
Photo “Joe Carr” by Joe Carr. Background Photo “Rutherford County Courthouse” by Ichabod. CC BY-SA 4.0.
