Cayce mayor wins fifth term. Longtime incumbent councilman forced into runoff

Elise Partin on Tuesday won re-election to her fifth four-year term as Cayce mayor.

The race ended a contentious match between Partin and challenger Abbott Bray, a Lexington School District Two board member.

Each candidate snapped back at anonymous pamphlets attacking their campaigns.

“I think some people will be able to sleep well and look their kids in their eyes, and I know I will,” Partin said of the campaign. “I’ve done it with honesty and integrity and ethics.”

Partin urged voters to be wary of anonymous “spooky mailers” that she said were untruthful about her in a Facebook post on Halloween.

Bray, meanwhile, said, “We must learn to #disagreebetter,” while holding up an anonymous letter that called his supporters racist, sexist or hateful.

In the council races, District 2 challenger Byron Thomas pushed his campaign against 21-year incumbent Skip Jenkins to a runoff by 5 votes, according to scvotes.org.

Voters will return to the polls in two weeks because no candidate received more than 50% of the vote.

In District 4, eight-year incumbent Phil Carter won his election handily against challengers Melvin Fields and Marcy Hayden.

Debra and Carl Selander, a cyber security analyst for Dominion Energy, have been Cayce residents since 1995. They came out to vote over Cayce’s taxes.

“I’m with you on the taxes,” he said to his wife, who’s a legal assistant. “I’d also like to see development here, a bit more going on.”

University of South Carolina art instructor Thomas Bosse said he came out to vote after not being as good about it when he was younger. He mainly came out for the mayoral race.

“There are a couple of things that bothered me a little, but I do like the things our mayor is doing,”  Bosse said of Partin. “They should be done a little longer.”

Many poll workers said this year’s election saw good turnout. Many polling places had more than 200 voters before 5 p.m.

Partin said after the election she plans on working to make Cayce more bike-accessible and continue the city’s archaeology project to recover the city’s neglected African American cemeteries.