percent, and Alldredge received 2 percent. In the runoff election Brown defeated Smith with 52 percent of the vote. According to Smith, Brown defeated him because he was able to gain five percent of the black vote. The 1989 Mayoral election
In the 1989 election, three candidates ran for the office of mayor, two of them
white. The two whites were William (Bill) Minor, a business owner, and Scott Robinson, a part-‐time pharmacist at Robinson’s Drugstore. The African American candidate was Eddie L. Smith, Jr. Of the three candidates, Smith took 46 percent, Robinson took 28 percent, and Minor took 26 percent of the vote. This set the stage for a runoff between Smith and Robinson.
The first results showed that Robinson had defeated Smith by 342 votes to
win the race for Mayor of Holly Springs in a record-‐setting runoff (Webb, 1989). It was alleged however that Robinson in fact had received a substantial vote to defeat his opponent, Robinson with 1,151 votes and Robinson with 1,209 votes. DeBerry questioned this result, reasoning that his winning Alderman-‐at-‐large indicated that Smith should have won Mayor. The votes, he argued, were parallel. Typically, the people that voted for DeBerry would have voted for Smith (A. DeBerry, Personal communication, September 18, 2012). A week following the ’89 election, the Democratic Executive Committee would declare Smith the winner of the Holly Springs Mayoral race (Webb, 1989). When originally declared the loser of the election, Smith challenged the results; stating that the name of his opponent and his had been reversed on the electronic voting machine. Also, Shoupe Voting Machine
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