Voter Registration Deadline for City of Anderson Elections March 8
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
It begins, as these things often do in Anderson, not with a stump speech or a yard sign, but with a deadline that keeps its own quiet counsel: March 8, at the stroke of midnight, when the rolls for the April 7 municipal elections close and the names are set.
The Anderson County Board of Registrations and Elections is reminding citizens of the City of Anderson of Anderson that voter registration for the April 7 municipal elections is March 8 at midnight.
To register online, visit SCVotes.org (requires driver’s license or S.C. DMV Voter ID card).
Those already registered are also encouraged to update any information that may have changed since the last elections. Here is their checklist:
• If you have moved, make sure you are ready to vote by updating your registration.
• If you have moved from one county to another, you must register in your new county by the deadline to be eligible to vote.
• If you've moved within your county or changed your name recently, it will help ensure a smoother voting process for you - and your neighbors - by updating your information prior to the deadline.
Register online at www.scvotes.gov (requires SC Driver's License or DMV ID Card)
• Register online before midnight on the day of the deadline
You can also register by:
• Visiting your county voter registration and elections office.
• Downloading a voter registration form from scvotes.gov. Complete and return it to your county voter registration and elections office:
On April 7, two of the city’s races will be contested, and a third will be settled without a fight. A single candidate has also stepped forward to claim the council seat left vacant by Luis Martinez, who resigned in December, leaving District 2 temporarily without a representative and City Hall with one more empty nameplate in its chamber.
At the top of the ballot, Mayor Terence Roberts, first elected in 2006 faces a challenge from Anderson photographer Van Sullivan Jr. The race will hinge on whether voters feel more loyalty to the steady hand they recognize or curiosity about how the city might appear through a new lens.
Roberts is a graduate of Winthrop University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in business administration/marketing in 1983. After college, he returned to Anderson and opened his own State Farm Insurance agency, building a long-running career in financial services and small-business management. He has been a State Farm agent and agency owner since 1988, a role he has continued to hold alongside his service as mayor. He was first elected mayor in 2006, defeating two-term incumbent Richard Shirley by a vote of 2,219 to 1,887. He has since been reelected multiple times, including an uncontested race in 2018 that secured a fourth term running from July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2022; his current term runs through June 30, 2026.
As mayor, Roberts has emphasized downtown revitalization, recreation, and neighborhood investment, helping attract restaurants, public art, and new businesses to the city center. He has also been involved in regional leadership efforts such as Ten at the Top, focusing on public safety and quality-of-life issues across the Upstate.
Sullivan’s education includes Anderson University and the Art Institute of Atlanta. He is a commercial and portrait photographer whose professional life has unfolded largely in the Southeast. He runs Sullivan Photography, a studio he has led as president since 2000, specializing in real estate, architecture, commercial work, events, and portraiture. He is closely tied to the Anderson Arts Community and has served as a photography teacher at the Anderson Arts Center, and earlier worked as an assistant photographer at TTI North America, shooting products, building sets, and processing images for packaging and reports. He has also held technical roles such as scan technician at Prime Media, where he digitized and color‑corrected images for publication.
More symbolic, however, is the open race for District 5 — a seat that, for almost half a century, has been held by Dr. Beatrice Thompson. Her retirement marks the the end of an era. Into that space steps her son, Darryl Thompson, who describes himself as a “community‑minded leader with over 20 years of experience in finance and strategic leadership,” and who seems intent on translating a corporate résumé into neighborhood governance. A Clemson University graduate, Thompson built a career in operations and consulting across the Greenville–Spartanburg–Anderson corridor, a region where logistics, manufacturing, and professional services bleed into one another along the interstate. In 2008, he founded Professional Pathways LLC, a firm devoted to training mid‑sized companies in the language of efficiency — lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, leadership development, and the intricate grammar of quality systems. Before striking out on his own, he held senior roles at Interface, Inc., serving as vice president for organizational learning from 2007 to 2008 and as corporate director of business systems from 2001 to 2007, posts that suggest fluency in both spreadsheets and the softer politics of change management. Since January 2025, he has been semi‑retired and self‑employed, a pause in a career that may yet find its next expression at the council dais.
Opposite him on the District 5 ballot is Tonya Winbush, whose credentials are rooted less in boardrooms than in waiting rooms and church basements. A community organizer and the lead medical support assistant at the Anderson VA Outpatient Clinic, Winbush occupies the daily front lines of bureaucracy and care, where veterans navigate appointments, paperwork, and the fragile work of being seen. She is, as she calls herself, a lifelong learner: she earned a Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Anderson University, a pursuit that stretched from 2008 to 2018, and has studied at Tri‑County Technical College. Her civic biography is dense. She serves as an executive committee member for the Anderson County Democratic Party and as Senior Vice Commander at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 689, where service is measured in hours and funerals rather than headlines. Environmental work has drawn her into the Upper Savannah River Basin Council and the Adopt‑A‑Stream program; having grown up on Lake Hartwell, she treats water not as a picturesque backdrop but as infrastructure and inheritance. Winbush organizes Bible study groups and community events, the small, steady convenings in which a district’s social fabric is quietly maintained. In 2025, she stood in for Dr. Thompson at public events, representing the long‑time councilwoman before voters now weighing whether to send a different Thompson — or Winbush herself — into that same seat.
If the District 5 race suggests a contest between legacy and reinvention, District 2 offers no such drama. There, Marshall Pickens III is running unopposed to complete the term in the seat vacated by Martinez. Pickens’s path to the ballot reads like a methodical ascent through the city’s institutional life. A finance and transportation professional, he works as an office support specialist at Southern First Bank in Greenville, a role that places him somewhere between the front counter and the back office of regional capitalism. He has served on the Anderson Planning Commission since August 2014, quietly helping decide where and how the city will grow, and sat as a trustee for the AnMed Health Foundation from 2018 to 2024, overseeing philanthropic currents in the local healthcare system. In 2016, he was named one of Anderson County’s “20 under 40,” an honorific that signaled an early consensus about his promise. He holds a Bachelor of Science in business administration from Anderson University, joining a familiar line of local leaders who never strayed far from their alma mater’s orbit.
Not every name on the April ballot will require voter deliberation. No opposition emerged for the remaining incumbents: District 1’s Kyle Newton, District 3’s Jeffrey Roberts, and at‑large Seat 7’s Matt Harbin will appear alone in their respective races, beneficiaries of that particular local equation in which satisfaction, apathy, and simple political caution are difficult to disentangle. Their quiet glide toward new terms forms the backdrop to the city’s more vivid contests.
