Local News

Election results for Western North Carolina

BPR News | By Lilly Knoepp,

Laura Hackett, Jose Sandoval, Felicia Sonmez, Laura Lee

Published November 7, 2023 at 6:55 PM EST

A sign directs voters in front of the Weaverville Community Center on November 7, 2023.

This is a developing story and will be updated. Check back here for live election results throughout the evening.

Note: These are the unofficial results as provisional and absentee ballots are still being counted.

Woodfin has a new mayor after more than two decades. Jim McAllister won the race against Jason Moore with nearly 80% of the approximately 800 votes.

In Sylva, Johnny Phillips won the mayoral race with 255 votes to Natalie Newman’s 174 votes.

In Waynesville, incumbent Mayor Gary Caldwell held onto his seat with 1,283 votes to Joey Reece’s 1,031 votes. Candidate John Barrett garnered just about 3% of the vote.

Incumbent Maggie Valley Mayor Mike Eveland bested challenger Janet Banks with 349 votes to Banks' 151 votes.

Gordon Maybury, Lauren Edgerton and Larry Hopkins were the top three contenders in the race for Woodfin Sanitary Water and Sewer District Board.

You can find live election results here.

Local News

Lilly Knoepp

Lilly Knoepp was a Senior Regional Reporter for Blue Ridge Public Radio. She served as BPR’s first fulltime reporter and covered Western North Carolina from 2018 to 2025. She is from Franklin, NC. She returns to WNC after serving as the assistant editor of Women@Forbes and digital producer of the Forbes podcast network. She holds a master’s degree in international journalism from the City University of New York and earned a double major from UNC Chapel Hill in religious studies and political science.

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Laura Hackett

Laura Hackett is an Edward R. Murrow award-winning reporter for Blue Ridge Public Radio. She joined the newsroom in 2023 as a Government Reporter and in 2025 moved into a new role as BPR's Helene Recovery Reporter. Before entering the world of public radio, she wrote for Mountain Xpress, AVLtoday and the Asheville Citizen-Times. She has a degree in creative writing from Florida Southern College, and in 2023, she completed the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY's Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program.

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Jose Sandoval

Jose Sandoval is the afternoon host and reporter for Blue Ridge Public Radio.

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Felicia Sonmez

Felicia Sonmez is a reporter covering growth and development for Blue Ridge Public Radio.

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Laura Lee

Laura Lee began her journalism career as a producer and booker at NPR. She returned to her native North Carolina to manage The State of Things, a live daily statewide show on WUNC. After working as a managing editor of an education journalism start-up, she became a writer and editor at a national education publication, Edutopia. She then served as the news editor at Carolina Public Press, a statewide investigative newsroom. In 2022, she worked to build collaborative coverage of elections administration and democracy in North Carolina.

Laura received her master’s in journalism from the University of Maryland and her bachelor’s degree in political science and J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

See stories by Laura Lee