Massive Voter Turnout Here Slowed PA Election Results

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Photos and story by Rick Hiduk

Wyoming County director of elections and voter registration Florence Ball (above) described an unprecedented year in a report to the County Commissioners on Tuesday. Nearly 80 percent of registered voters participated in the general election, which made for a long night at the courthouse in Tunkhannock (top).

Wyoming County residents who stayed up late on Nov. 8 to watch the election returns may have been puzzled by the county-by-county map of Pennsylvania that did not show a win for either Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton by midnight in the traditionally Republic county.

Election officials and the County Commissioners, however, were well aware of the situation, and it did not have as much to do with malfunctioning machines as had been rumored on social media throughout the day.

The holdup, as it turns out, was in Tunkhannock Township’s first precinct. Of 1,263 residents who voted there, many turned out in the later hours. Tunkhannock Township also had one of three machines in the county that needed to be recalibrated.

“With the transport of the machines, a few are going to be knocked out of calibration,” Wyoming County director of elections and voter registration Florence Ball explained via email. “This issue happens every election and is immediately corrected. Tunkhannock Township opted to shut the machine down rather than mess with the recalibration.”

 As polls closed at 8 pm, Commissioner Tom Henry related, there was still a long line of people waiting to vote. By law, anyone already in line at the closing bell must be allowed to cast his or her ballot. While electronic results and boxes of paper ballots from the county’s other 29 precincts were at the courthouse by 10 pm, the results from Tunkhannock Township did not arrive until just after midnight.

Some of us still did not know the outcome when we went to bed,” said Henry. “But I think that everything went smoothly in Wyoming County.”

The overall result was a Republican sweep. And, while the Republican win did not surprise many people in Wyoming County, it was part of a groundswell revolution by rural voters that put Trump over the top across the nation in states that the media had all but handed to Clinton based on early exit polls.

It’s that ‘T’ effect,” said Democratic Commissioner Ron Williams, in reference to the middle and northern tier of the state that lawmakers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh jokingly refer to as “Pennsyl-Tucky.” Despite the fact that Republicans swept the presidency, the House, the Senate, and all of the state races, Williams said that he was proud of Wyoming County for coming out to the polls in what the commissioners agreed must have been historic proportions.

Indeed, the national media not only discounted the power of rural voters, it continuously bashed them by suggesting that they are “undereducated” and were unlikely to overturn the early vote counts in Pennsylvania biggest cities, including Harrisburg, where Clinton received many more votes than her opponent. The months-long snub clearly incited many in the countryside to go to the polls after years of apathy. Trump won Pennsylvania by less than 65,000 votes out of nearly 6 million cast but took all of the state’s 20 electoral votes.

CNN was at least one network to tentatively put Pennsylvania in the Clinton column, only to have to switch that and other states to Trump as the rural votes were tallied. The timing of the turnaround on the electoral vote scoreboard in the wee hours of the morning made Pennsylvania – not Florida – the pivotal state to put Trump over the top.

Citing the particularly late returns here, Henry mused that it might have been Wyoming County that gave the boisterous billionaire the edge. Overall, of 13,360 votes cast here, Trump received 8,375 or 67 percent in Wyoming County. Clinton garnered just 3,573 votes or about 29 percent.

The same was true across the Endless Mountains, with Trump receiving about 71 percent of the vote in Bradford County, 73 percent in Sullivan County, and 69 percent in Susquehanna County. Lackawanna County was the only voter block in Northeast Pennsylvania to give Clinton a narrow lead at 50.22 percent.

Wyoming County election turnout was reportedly the highest in Tunkhannock Borough’s third precinct with as many as 90 percent of the voters making it to the polls. Meshoppen Borough had the lowest turnout with a still respectable 66.67 percent.

Trump soundly won 29 of Wyoming County’s 30 precincts, the lone exception being Factoryville’s first ward – somewhat more aligned both politically and economically with the Scranton area than the rest of the county – where the two candidates tied at 137 votes each. Factoryville’s second ward, however, gave Trump 54 percent of their vote, resulting in a Trump win of 251 to 221 borough-wide.

Though the nation’s rigid two-party system left little room for Libertarian, Green, or Constitution party candidates to greatly effect the race, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson garnered more than five percent of the votes in Laceyville, and Tunkhannock borough’s first and fourth wards, with the first ward giving him 9 votes or 6 percent. Green Party candidate Jill Stein beat Johnson in Fall Township’s first precinct and Tunkhannock borough’s second ward. County wide, Johnson beat Stein with a total of 305 to 112.

The bitter and divisive election produced the two most unpopular presidential candidates in American history with both Clinton and Trump eclipsing the 60 percent mark as “unfavorable.” That said, many went to the polls to vote for “the lesser of two evils.” If that is truly the case, the three precincts where voters disliked Clinton the most were Mehoopany Township, Forkston Township, and Meshoppen Township, each giving Clinton less than 20 percent of the vote. Even though he won, Trump’s biggest detractors (or Clinton’s biggest fans) hailed from Factoryville, where Clinton received more than 40 percent of the votes in both wards, and Tunkhannock’s second ward, where she received just over 40 percent.

The Republican sweep doomed all other opponents running for state and federal positions, especially US Senator candidate Katie McGinty and state Auditor General candidate Eugene Pasquale. Republican Patrick Toomey received almost twice as many votes as McGinty at 7,407, and Republican John Brown won with 60 to 32 percent of the overall vote.

In Wyoming County, McGinty fared best in Factoryville, Clinton and Overfield townships, and Tunkhannock’s second ward. Pasquale found the most support in the same precincts.

Only 16 provisional ballots were cast in the county, and only six of them were deemed ineligible for the final count. Provisional ballots are allowed by individuals whose registration cannot be verified at the time of voting. The six that were disqualified were found to not be registered or to be registered in other counties. There are currently 16,820 registered voters in Wyoming County.

Complete election results for Wyoming County should be posted by the end of the week at www.wycopa.org, while county-by-county tallies can be accessed at www.electionreturns.pa.gov.

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Wyoming County director of elections and voter registration Florence Ball (above, left) indicated that the general election capped an unprecedented year of activity for her office. There were more than 5,000 application changes since the primary elections in April,  including more than 800 new voter registrations, changes in party affiliation and updating of addresses.

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