How I’m Voting on November 3: A Personal, Essential Guide

And Why the Sample Ballot Only Tells You Half the Story

Folks, I have had more emails, DMs, phone calls, and Sunday-greeting-line cornerings in the last ten days than I have since the great boudin shortage of 2024. Everybody wants to know the same thing: “How is Dean Burnette voting on November 3rd?”

I get it. Life is busy. A lot of good, hardworking folks—between putting in forty-plus hours on the job, coaching Little League, hunting on Saturday morning, and being in the church pew on Sunday—just don’t have forty hours to wade through every single name, legal disclaimer, and constitutional amendment on the sample ballot. You want to know where a conservative, God-fearing, Constitution-loving Southern fella stands. 

I’m going to tell you. Twice if the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise. Once here on Southern Fried Thoughts, once on my Substack for the long-form readers, and a third time on a one-page cheat sheet you’ll find in this post. Print it. Fold it.

Early voting runs October 13 through October 30. Election Day, November 3, polls are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Leave the phone in the truck unless you need it as an assistive device. 

Before I walk you through every race and every question, I want to talk about something the sample ballot does not put on the paper — but it puts it on the people. What a candidate believes. What a candidate worships. And what a candidate is willing to defend when the cameras are off and the votes are tallied.

I’ll get to that in a bit. 

The short version, the way I’d mark it: every contested partisan race, the Republican. Two local races have no Republican at all. On the questions: Yes, No, Yes, and Yes.

Office / Question	Dean’s Recommendation	Note
U.S. Senate	Mike Collins (R)	Border security & America First
Governor	Rick Jackson (R)	Low taxes, pro-business growth
Lieutenant Governor	Greg Dolezal (R)	Conservative Senate leadership
Secretary of State	Tim Fleming (R)	Secure, orderly elections
Attorney General	Brian Strickland (R)	Defending rule of law & state rights
Agriculture Commissioner	Tyler Harper (R)	Standing up for GA farmers/timber
Insurance Commissioner	John King (R)	Fighting fraud and runaway rates
State School Superintendent	Richard Woods (R)	Parental rights & back-to-basics
Labor Commissioner	Bárbara Rivera Holmes (R)	Pro-job, pro-workforce policy
PSC District 3	Fitz Johnson (R)	Keep conservative utility commission
PSC District 5	Josh Tolbert (R)	Engineering sense over ideology
U.S. House District 1	James “Jim” Kingston (R)	Strong coastal representation
State Senate District 2	Blank / Write-In	No Republican candidate
State House District 163	Blank / Write-In	No Republican candidate
Soil & Water Supervisor	Local Discretion / Blank	Asa Evergreen (Nonpartisan)
Amendment 1 (Farm Cap)	YES	Protects family farm/timber land
Amendment 2 (Probate Judges)	NO	Keep partisan labels transparent
Amendment 3 (9-1-1 Lockbox)	YES	Protects first responder funding
Chatham School Tax Freeze	YES	Stops runaway home assessment taxes

Before we look at the Chatham County sample ballot oval-by-oval, I want to step back and look at the bigger picture. Because casting a vote isn’t just picking names on a screen; it’s an act of stewardship over the greatest republic God ever allowed man to build.

The Bigger Picture: Preserving the Melting Pot and Protecting Our Heritage

If you turn on the evening news, the talking heads want you divided, angry, and anxious. Division drives cable ratings, and outrage sells ad time. But as Christians, Jews, and patriotic, blue-collar Americans who love this land, we are called to something higher: truth, courage, discernment, and neighborly love.

That doesn’t mean we check our brains at the door.

Lately, folks look across the Atlantic at Europe and the United Kingdom—or look right here at home in places like Michigan and Minnesota—and they feel an uneasy rumble in their gut. We see the friction between traditional Western freedoms and the rise of legal and cultural ideologies, including strict Sharia systems, that historically run counter to the foundational liberties of the West. 

Now, let me be crystal clear: I am not painting roughly two billion people with one broad brush. Millions of Muslim individuals around the world seek peaceful lives and want stability for their families. But ideas have consequences. For centuries, traditional Judaeo-Christian culture, Western legal tradition, and the American Constitution have built an order grounded in individual liberty, freedom of conscience, equal protection under the law, and freedom of speech. 

When you study world history—from classical times to modern street scenes in European capitals—you see what happens when a culture stops insisting on assimilation. When cultural standards fragment, societies begin to fracture. As my fellow Louisianian, former Governor Bobby Jindal, said so plainly: “Immigration without assimilation is invasion.” Jindal had the grit to call it out: when people come to this country, they should want to be Americans, roll up their sleeves, adopt our founding principles, and become part of the great melting pot.

President Theodore Roosevelt said the exact same thing a century earlier: this nation cannot survive as a tangled tangle of hyphenated loyalties; we must share an allegiance to our Constitution, the rule of law, and our God-given liberties. Bill Maher, who is nobody’s choir director at First Baptist, has said the same cultural point from the other pew: a melting pot needs shared standards, or it is just a boarding house where nobody agrees on the house rules. You can love your Muslim neighbor and still refuse to import that operating system. 

Three voices. Three corners. Same warning.

Congress is starting to catch up. In 2026, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced the No Immigration Without Assimilation Act, which would require an assimilation likelihood screening before any visa could be issued — a check on whether the applicant’s worldview is fundamentally compatible with American self-government, or whether they’re bringing a foreign operating system to a machine that already runs on something better.

These are not radicals. These are people standing in widely different places on the political map, agreeing on one uncomfortable observation: a republic built on the rule of law cannot hold if the people inside it don’t share what the Founders called “the habits of the heart.”

The Heritage Foundation has documented the failures of European multiculturalism in study after study. (See Heritage.org, “Immigration” and “Society” indexes.) PragerU has produced an entire library of conversations on the topic, including Dennis Prager’s teaching on why a society built on the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights cannot merge with a society built on the Quranic penal code. (See PragerU.com, search “Islam” and “Western Civilization.”) Real America’s Voice has run segments on Dearborn’s tax rolls and Detroit-area school enrollment. OANN has spent reporting time on European welfare data and the funding flows that come with refugee resettlement.

These are not opinions. They are observations.

And they are observations that line up with what you can see with your own eyes if you fly to Detroit, drive to Rotherham, or read a Swedish police report you have to translate from the original Swedish.

In 2026, Rep. Nancy Mace introduced the No Immigration Without Assimilation Act. Whatever you think of the bill’s odds, the list of views it treats as disqualifying is the list a free country is allowed to care about: religious law replacing or running beside American law, including Sharia; violence justified by religion or politics; the idea that constitutional rights should not apply to some people; the idea that authoritarian rule beats representative government; a refusal to learn English. That is not hatred of a people. That is a country insisting on its own operating manual.

Are Muslim communities in Detroit, Dearborn, and other high-concentration pockets assimilating?

Some are. Some are not, and the ones that are not are not shy about it. Parallel norms, imported disputes, pressure on speech, and politicians who treat criticism of the doctrine as bigotry rather than as argument — that is the warning light, not the mosque potluck. Europe has been running the experiment longer. Christian Europe was nearly the whole map in 1900. By the mid-2020s, scholars tracking the religious makeup of the continent were counting on the order of fifty-plus million Muslims, grown largely by migration from North Africa and Western Asia, while church identification fell hard. Parts of Britain, France, Belgium, and Sweden now have neighborhoods where the street rules are not the street rules of the country that issued the passport. Fertility gaps have narrowed in some groups and stayed wide in others. Demographers argue about the pace. They do not argue that the change is imaginary.

Welfare is part of the same conversation, and I will not invent a spreadsheet I have not seen. What I will say is what any county commissioner already knows: when birth rates at home are low, and newcomers arrive faster than they join the taxpaying middle, somebody else’s grocery bill and somebody else’s school millage carry the difference. A nation can welcome workers. It cannot survive as a benefits office with no assimilation desk. America has done the first job better than Europe. We should not get cocky and quit the second.

None of that is a reason to hate a man because of his grandfather’s passport. It is a reason to ask, before you fill an oval, whether the candidate loves this Constitution more than he loves the applause of people who do not. Candidates who treat the founding as an embarrassment, who wink at parallel law, who call assimilation bigotry, and who think patriotism is a ratings problem will not announce it on a soil-and-water race. They will show it in how they talk about borders, speech, schools, crime, and whose values get to write the next statute. Unintended consequences do not send a calendar invite. They just show up.

Now, you won’t find the words “Sharia law” or a single foreign treaty anywhere on our Chatham County ballot this November. That’s not what’s printed on the paper. 

So why bring it up? 

Because worldview matters. What a candidate fundamentally believes about liberty, religious freedom, individual accountability, and the Constitution determines how they will govern when nobody is watching. When leaders treat the Constitution as an obstacle or see the American melting pot as something to dismantle rather than cherish, our culture erodes from the inside out. 

Voting isn’t an unconstitutional religious test for candidates; it is a test of their fidelity to our founding covenant, our borders, our families, and our freedoms. Don’t vote for folks who view our heritage with embarrassment. Vote for folks who will protect it. Then go home, and remember the thing the ratings folks hope you forget. Your neighbor is not your enemy because a sample ballot has two columns. Not every person who shows up is a good neighbor, either. Some want the joy, the Judaeo-Christian inheritance, and the patriotism stripped out and replaced with something that does not argue back. Vote like you noticed. Tip your hat on the way out. The country is still worth the trouble.

Now, let’s get down to the brass tacks. Let’s walk the ballot. 

The Why:

• U.S. Senate — Mike Collins (R)

  Jon Ossoff has held this seat since 2021 and votes the way Washington Democratic leadership tells him to. He is a polite man. He is a grown man. He is not the man I want driving policy when an America-first trucker from Jackson already has the keys in his pocket.

Mike Collins is the trucking-company founder, current congressman, and the man who carried the Laken Riley Act through the House. He won the GOP runoff with his boots on. He believes in border security, energy independence, and the kind of fiscal discipline that does not require three spreadsheets, a grant writer, and a podcast tour.

For a voter who wants the Senate seat back in Republican hands so we can stop the Democrats’ committee-chair advantage, this race is not complicated.

• Governor — Rick Jackson (R)

  Brian Kemp is term-limited, and I respect him for eight years of low-drama, high-results governorship. But Kemp’s office is now open.

Rick Jackson is a Georgia health-care businessman who beat Burt Jones in the runoff and is running on a sunny promise: cut the state income tax further, and put Georgia-designed work requirements into the Medicaid expansion so that able-bodied adults have to work, train, or do community service to draw benefits. Washington wrote a Medicaid expansion that pays states to enroll folks whether they were working or not. Georgia wrote one that pairs the coverage with the ladder. I want a governor who believes a hand up beats a handout and that the state’s job is to design ladders, not hammocks.

Keisha Lance Bottoms is the former Atlanta mayor and former Biden adviser. Bless her heart. No thank you, ma’am.

• Lieutenant Governor — Greg Dolezal (R)

This is the gavel race. The Lt. Governor presides over the State Senate, which means committee chairmanships, the calendar, and the flow of bills. Dolezal is the Forsyth County senator Kemp endorsed. He is tied to income-tax cuts and school choice. His opponent is Josh McLaurin, the Sandy Springs Democrat whose brand is essentially mocking the other side. The State Senate gavel belongs in conservative hands. Dolezal. Keep the Senate gavel in steady, principled hands with Dolezal.

• Secretary of State — Tim Fleming (R)

This office runs the elections. Fleming is the Covington representative and the GOP runoff winner. Penny Brown Reynolds is the Democratic opponent. After the Brad Raffensperger years, in which our Secretary of State acted more like an apology letter to CNN than a Georgia election administrator, a Republican in this seat is a matter of basic trust. Fleming.

• Attorney General — Brian Strickland (R)

  The Attorney General defends state laws, supports law enforcement, backs our sheriffs, and fights federal overreach. Strickland has the legal mind and conservative spine Georgia needs against activist legal agendas. 

The Down-Ballot Republicans

• State School Superintendent — Richard Woods (R, Incumbent)

  Woods has been a steady hand. He has not been a culture-war fire-breather, and that is fine — the office is about testing, charter authorization, parental rights, and keeping the Atlanta curriculum machine off our kids.  Curriculum battles, educational freedom, and treating parents as primary partners instead of classroom obstacles—Woods has stood firm for Georgia’s kids and parents. Keep him on the job.

• Commissioner of Agriculture — Tyler Harper (R, Incumbent)

This office lives next to the gumbo pot and the timber tract. Agriculture and timber are the backbone of Georgia’s economy. Harper is a dirt-under-the-fingernails leader who defends our farmers, protects our food supply, and preserves rural Georgia. Easy choice: Harper.

• Commissioner of Insurance — John King (R, Incumbent)

  Rates, fraud, fire safety — the boring-sounding shop that turns into the urgent shop the day after your house catches fire. King is the incumbent Republican. King brings law enforcement discipline and straightforward accountability to rate stability, fraud investigation, and community safety. Keep King.

• Commissioner of Labor — Bárbara Rivera Holmes (R, Incumbent)

  Workforce programs, apprenticeship pipelines, technical-college partnerships, and the state’s posture toward employers versus activist labor politics. Holmes is the incumbent Republican. Holmes focuses on connecting Georgians to meaningful work, defending our right-to-work status, and keeping state labor policy aligned with job creators rather than union activists. Keep Holmes.

• Public Service Commission, District 3 — Fitz Johnson (R)

  Every Georgian votes on this one, not just folks in the district. The PSC sets the table for your power bill and for who pays when the data centers show up hungry and want somebody else to subsidize the grid upgrades. The PSC oversees utility rates and energy infrastructure, especially as massive energy users like industrial data centers enter our state. 

The incumbent is Democrat Peter Hubbard, who beat Johnson in a 2025 special. If Hubbard keeps this seat and the Democrats also win District 5, the left gets a majority on the PSC for the first time in a generation. Majority math is policy. Johnson is the Army veteran and former commissioner running on rate freezes and insisting that large-load users (data centers, crypto farms, gigawatt-scale factories) carry their own grid costs instead of socializing them onto your bill. The Heritage Foundation has documented this problem over and over in their energy-and-electricity work, with Daily Signal coverage that walks a layman through it. (See Heritage.org and DailySignal.com archives, “Energy & Environment.”)

A word to the wise: critics have noted that Fitz Johnson’s campaign has drawn heavy contributions from interests tied to the very utilities his commission would regulate. I want you to know that. I do not get a pass on transparency. But I am not handing the majority to the other party to register a protest vote. Johnson.

• Public Service Commission, District 5 — Josh Tolbert (R)

  An open seat vacated by Tricia Pridemore. Tolbert is a professional engineer who relies on grid physics and sound market economics over costly energy mandates. Vote Tolbert to protect grid reliability.

The Federal Race on the Tail

• U.S. House, District 1 — James “Jim” Kingston (R)

  In Buddy Carter’s former coastal district, Savannah native Jim Kingston earned President Trump’s endorsement and broad grassroots backing. His opponent advocates for heavier regulatory mandates and union-dominated economic policies. Kingston will preserve the conservative tradition of Georgia’s coast.

The Two Races Where the Ballot Forgot to Offer You a Choice

State Senate, District 2 — SKIP or WRITE-IN

Derek Mallow is the Democratic incumbent, and he is the only name besides Write-in. I do not fill in a Democrat’s oval to “be polite.” A blank oval is an honest vote when the ballot forgot to offer you a real choice. So skip it or write in a neighbor you actually trust.

State House, District 163 — SKIP or WRITE-IN

Same story. Anne Allen Westbrook is the Democratic incumbent, unopposed except for a Write-in line. Skip or write-in.

If your party forgot to field a candidate, a blank ballot is a protest the registrar actually counts. Don’t let anybody guilt you into a courtesy vote for the other team.

The Quiet Race

Chatham County Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor — Asa Evergreen is the only name on the ballot. No party is listed, and I do not have a clean conservative case for or against that person. Soil-and-water seats are usually quiet, local, and nonpartisan. If you know the candidate from the farm bureau, the co-op, or the church potluck, vote your local knowledge. If you do not, leaving it blank is no sin.

The Four Questions on the Back of the Ballot

This is the part folks miss sometimes, and the part that decides your tax bill and who takes your 9-1-1 call at 2 a.m.

Amendment 1 — CUVA acreage from 2,000 to 4,000. Yes.

Conservation Use Valuation Assessment taxes qualifying farm and timber land on how it is used, not on what a developer would pay. One owner can enroll up to 2,000 acres today. This doubles that cap. If voters say yes, it takes effect January 1, 2027. State Sen. Sam Watson, who carried it, has said the old cap was written for an older picture of the family farm.

It keeps more land in grass, row crops, and trees instead of forcing a sale because the tax bill is priced like a subdivision. The honest caveat: “family farm” on the ballot can also mean a large tract, a partnership, or a timber outfit already near the cap, and a lower assessment means less digest for counties and schools unless somebody else makes up the difference. I’d still rather see a pasture than a parking lot, and I do not want the tax man deciding when a farm breaks up. If your first love is maximum local school revenue, a conservative no is available. Mine is not.

Amendment 2 — nonpartisan probate judges. No.

Probate judges handle wills, estates, guardianships, marriage licenses, and in some counties a piece of election administration. Most other Georgia judges already run without a party label. Only a few counties — on the order of a few dozen out of 159 — still elect probate judges as partisans. This would finish the job.

Pros. Matches the rest of the bench. A will contest is a poor place for a yard-sign war.

Cons. “Nonpartisan” is not the same as “no politics.” It mostly hides the label. Party is a blunt but useful signal when you do not know the candidates, which is most of us, most years. Taking it off the ballot makes it easier for a well-funded local machine to sneak through, and harder for a busy voter to tell a conservative from a progressive in a black robe.

How I’m voting: No. I like knowing where a person stands before I hand them the courthouse keys. Other judges being nonpartisan is a reason to be careful, not a reason to finish the job.

Amendment 3 — Next Generation 9-1-1 Fund. Yes.

It lets the legislature park certain existing revenues — not a brand-new tax written on this ballot — in a fund that does not expire at the end of the year and can be spent only on 9-1-1 systems. Broad support from both parties. When you dial 9-1-1, you do not want a food fight standing between you and a dispatcher. A lockbox is harder to raid for a pet project. Constitutional lockboxes reduce flexibility, and bad legislators can still define “9-1-1” generously. I’d take the dedicated fund and watch the legislature like a hawk anyway. That is not cynicism. That is citizenship.

Chatham County school homestead referendum. Yes.

Chatham already has a floating homestead exemption on school taxes, pushed by local Republicans including Ron Stephens and Jesse Petrea. This tightens it: the adjusted base year cannot rise above the 2025 assessed value. A freeze at the 2025 homestead number for school taxes, not a repeal of school taxes.

Predictability for people who already own a home and intend to stay. School taxes are the big bite on a Chatham bill. The school system has fretted that a floating exemption limits how fast revenue grows. Over time, more of the bill can land on new homeowners, renters, and businesses. I will take the homeowner’s side of that trade every time, and then hold the school board to a budget that fits. Gratitude is not a blank check.

Okay. Now the Part the Sample Ballot Didn’t Print.

We’ve walked the races and the questions. Let me step back and say something I’d say at the dinner table if the kids were old enough to take it seriously.

What a candidate believes matters. Not which Sunday they sit in. Not how loud they pray in a stump speech. Whether, when the cameras are off and the votes are tallied, they will defend the Constitution that was handed to us — by the hand of God, as Teddy Roosevelt once said — with the same ferocity they use to defend their own party. That is the only question that matters long term, because every other question is downstream of it.

This is not a religious test. The Constitution forbids that, and so does the Gospel. But it is a values test. And there is a growing question in Western democracies that neither Washington nor Atlanta is willing to ask out loud. It is past time somebody asked it. And since you asked me how I’m voting, you are hereby volunteered to listen to the answer.

Louisiana Born | Georgia Grown | Grateful USA Citizen

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