Catoosa Primary Voters Want GOP to Block RINOs, Ballot Questions Reveal

Ringgold, GA — On Tuesday, primary voters in Catoosa County voted 77% in favor of having the local Republican Party organization protect the Republican Primary ballot from undercover Democrat candidates.

The question read: “Do you believe that anyone, even closet Democrats, should be able to run on the Republican primary ballots?”

76.82% of Republican voters said, “No.”

This comes after the Catoosa GOP attempted to deny specific commission candidates a place on the primary ballot who had a track record of imposing anti-Republican policies.

In case there was any confusion, Catoosa voters made it abundantly clear when a whopping 85%, 87% and 89% answered “yes” to the following:

11. “Do you want the Republican Party to ensure our candidates for office are for gun rights?”

12. “Do you want the Republican Party to ensure our candidates for office are for lower taxes?”

13. “Do you want the Republican Party to ensure our candidates for office are pro-life?”

Ballot questions like these are non-binding surveys but are used by local and state parties to guage what Republican voters (who never attend party meetings or events) actually think about the issues. Ballot questions are valuable because the results help guide the party, and inform Republican politicians what their constituents want and believe.

“I don’t pay too much attention to local politics, unfortunately, and that’s why I really appreciate the local GOP keeping these people accountable and ensuring that only true Republicans are actually on the ballot,” said Joseph Cochran, a GenX Catoosa voter.

While the Establishment and leftist media suggest that Catoosa GOP’s volunteer leadership team is a radical fringe group who are out of touch with everyday Republican voters, and that primary voters want to do their own personal vetting of all candidates’ ideology, this data proves that three out of four Republican voters in Catoosa county actually want the Republican Party to vet candidates before they are allowed on the Republican ballot.

“What I noticed from reading the answers to the ballot questions,” said GRA Chairman & attorney Alex Johnson, “is that over 76% of Catoosa County Republican voters don’t want anyone who wants to, to be able to run on the Republican Primary ballot, and over 84% of them want the party to ensure candidates are for lower taxes, gun rights, and Prolife.”

They want someone from the party ensuring a candidate meets a minimum standard. They don’t think their selection in the voting booth on primary Election Day is where the Democrats should get eliminated. They want that to occur earlier. They want to walk into the voting booth on primary Election Day and feel confident that they are choosing between two or more people who hold at least a base-level adherence to core Republican ideology.

You might say, they want the Republican party to pre-qualify the options as being “non-Democrat” before that candidate’s name ever appears on the ballot as an option. Lucky for Catoosa voters, this process already exists and it is called “candidate qualification.” This is the process by which the Republican Party serves Republican voters by eliminating rotten apples before dishing up the options to the voters. They file the paperwork with the county and the names of whichever candidates they “qualified” as Republicans.

But this process has been circumvented by the Catoosa Board of Elections and the question continues to be litigated in court.

Does a county party have a right to turn down a candidate? The 11th Circuit court said “yes” because the constitution protects the right to freedom of association.

Catoosa GOP has received significant criticism of their efforts to block specific county commission candidates from the primary ballot when those candidates had a history of supporting anti-Republican policy. For two years the argument was that any person has a right to run and have their name appear on the Republican primary ballot, no matter what they believe, no matter what kind of public record they have, as long as they pay the qualifying fee, and sign their name on the loyalty oath to the party. But in an appalling act of government coercion this year, the Catoosa Board of Elections didn’t even allow the Catoosa GOP to disqualify someone who failed to sign the loyalty oath!

The bottom line is that tests, interviews, and auditions only frighten away weak performers … or fakes. Real Republicans who believe in limited government, low taxes, family values, the right to bear arms, etc., are not scared to sit down and talk about what they believe and are not daunted by a pass or fail examination of their record on public policy. Differences of opinion and approach to public policy exist within the party, and are not disqualifiers, so long as those differences remain within the parameters of base-level Republicanism.