MARLIN, Texas — "I just believe that we were hijacked as a city and that it was done intentionally,” former mayor of Marlin Carolyn Lofton said.
With election season officially underway in Marlin, there are still questions about last year's election for mayor.
I sat down with former mayor Carolyn Lofton who told me she believes vote tampering happened.
Lofton told me she hired an election attorney to investigate the results.
“He went through all of the tally sheets and he went through all of the ballots. We have all of that documentation and there were in fact nine additional ballots that were added after the election,” Lofton said.
“None of them have duplicate numbers which means it wasn’t a photocopy of a ballot. They were original ballots and there’s not enough individuals who voted to account for them so that tells me there was tampering in that election,” Lofton said.
The official results show Lofton lost to current mayor Susan Byrd by only two votes.
But it's unclear what the Mayor Byrd has to say on the matter.
I tried numerous times to reach Byrd by phone and email—even visiting city hall to request an interview with her.
On Tuesday evening, I went to a city meeting hoping to get her response to the former mayor's claims, but she was not in attendance.
As for Lofton, she is choosing not to go forward with a lawsuit against the city.
“It’s time for Marlin knights to wake up. Quit depending on other people to come into the community and do things for you that you should be doing for yourself. There is more than enough educated, capable individuals living within our community that we should be running Marlin and no one else,” Lofton said.
