A great showing at polls, now it’s time for early voting

It wasn’t just a voter referendum on President Donald Trump that changed the Pennsylvania landscape in last week’s midterm elections. Solid judicial decisions played a role, too, particularly the court-ordered redrawing of a gerrymandered congressional map that had favored Republicans. And years earlier, the overturning of a restrictive voter ID law.

This is progress, but Pennsylvania still trails many states in voter access. Early voting would help bring the state into the 21st century. (If you waited in a long line in the rain on Tuesday, you might want to send a follow-up message to your state representative and senator. In Harrisburg, bills to allow early voting die in committee.)

Pennsylvania’s idea of early voting is by absentee ballot – but you have to mail in a sworn statement that you’re disabled or going to be out of town on Election Day.

Thirty-seven states extend some form of early voting. New Jersey, for example, allows noexcuse absentee voting, and lets people vote early in person at voter registration sites, for 45 days before an election.

What else? Same-day registration would be a step forward, along with easier ballot access for third-party candidates. And open primaries.

A predicted blue wave of Democratic fervor didn’t sweep through every corner Pennsylvania last week, but a statewide rebalancing took hold.

In January, the state’s congressional delegation will be perfectly purple — nine Republicans and nine Democrats, a dramatic change from the gerrymandered results of the last decade. That imbalance, enabled by a Republican governor and Legislature, helped to elect 13 Republicans to Congress, even though Democrats turned out in higher numbers overall.

Pennsylvania played a leading role in turning the U.S. House of Representatives to a Democratic majority. The state saw an unprecedented number of women candidates, including Democrat Susan Wild, who captured the Lehigh Valley’s newly drawn 7th District. Here in Delaware County, it was Mary Gay Scanlon taking the new 5th District seat.

It’s notable that Wild won by 15,000 votes in the new 7th district, which reunited the Lehigh Valley. Republican Marty Nothstein, by a razor-thin margin, appears to have won the race to serve the final two months of former Rep. Charlie Dent’s term in the old 15th District. That district was gerrymandered to protect Dent after the 2010 census.

Republicans still ran strong, and won, in Republican-dominated areas of the state.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Still, Pennsylvania voters sent a message in re-electing U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, as New Jersey voters did in returning ethically challenged Sen. Robert Menendez to Washington.

Pennsylvanians opted for a split state government again, choosing Gov. Tom Wolf as a hedge against legislative Republicans, who retained majorities in both houses.

The rancorous segregation of Americans into red and blue camps isn’t going away, and it won’t be helped by selectively limiting voter access – as North Dakota did in making voting difficult for native Americans. A town in Kansas moved a polling site out of town. Georgia and other states have opted for aggressive purging of registration rolls.

It falls to the courts, in many cases, to point out partisan overload. Witness the federal court decision last week to toss Maryland’s congressional map. It had been sliced and diced, a panel of judges said, to help elect Democrats.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

– The Easton Express-Times

Keep moving full steam ahead

It was exhilarating last week to see such engagement from voters.

The electorate came out in droves, not only across the state and country, but locally. Estimates show that the percentage of voters in each of Fayette, Greene, Westmoreland and Washington counties who made their voices heard surpassed the percentage of those who showed up nationally and across Pennsylvania.

It should be a moment of pride across our local counties, where voter turnout hasn’t always been extraordinary.

Election bureau directors from each of the four counties said turnout was above 50 percent (the lowest was Fayette at 53.2 percent). Westmoreland County, where there are nearly a quarter of a million registered voters, had a turnout of 59.4 percent. Rewind six months to the May primary and you’ll find that turnout in Fayette and Westmoreland didn’t crack 20 percent.

The turnout locally surprised even the most seasoned election bureau directors, some of whom said they’ve never seen that type of turnout for a midterm election.

Nationwide, according to the United States Election Project, 49.2 percent of those eligible to vote made their voices heard. Pennsylvania’s overall percentage was 50 percent, according to the organization.

Midterm elections, i.e. those for U.S. House and U.S. Senate that fall between presidential elections, don’t always bring a lot of excitement. The state’s overall turnout in 2014 was 36 percent and in 2010 it was 42.4 percent.

That the nationwide turnout nearly cracked 50 percent might feel like a “big whoop” moment to some. Without a doubt, the number still isn’t where it should be.

However, the last time such a high percentage turned out for a midterm election was 52 years ago, according to numbers from the United States Election Project, but at the time, the legal voting age was still 21.

So yes, to one of every two voters coming out on Nov. 6, we say, “That’s amazing.”

But we must feed that sense of civic duty and foster it so that it grows during next year’s municipal elections, where we’ll nominate and then choose candidates for county, city, borough and township offices. Among those up for election are commissioners — the group of three who will lead our counties. Mayors, council members, township supervisors, magisterial district judges and other county-level row offices will also be up for grabs.

The people elected to those offices might not make the same headlines as those in state and federal ones, but they impact the daily lives of the residents they serve.

At the polls last week, a Uniontown woman told one of our reporters that she read an article that said those who vote are usually the ones who are “enraged or engaged.” That leaves elections decided by those who are heavily involved in politics or incensed by the political climate.

As Nov. 6 proved, you needn’t be in either of those camps to participate.

You just need to care enough to go.

– The Herald-Standard