Hectic preparation for primaries

Presidential races expected to boost interest by voters

Montgomery County election officials are preparing for Tuesday’s primary election in the face of potentially higher-thanaverage turnout, and a few obstacles along the way.

Chairwoman of the Montgomery County Board of Elections Val Arkoosh said voters come out in presidential election years, and that this year, the primary falls during races that are still competitive.

“I am hoping that this being a presidential year, and the fact that for the first time in many cycles the Pennsylvania primary is meaningful to both political parties that we will have a much higher turnout than usual,” Arkoosh said. “In Montgomery County we are doing everything possible to make voting as easy and as efficient as possible, so voters have no excuses.”

In 2008, the last presidential primary election that did not include an incumbent, 37.4 percent of registered voters in Montgomery County turned out to vote. Registered Democrats, who were still weighing in on the race between Hillary Clinton and thenSenator Barack Obama, had a much higher turnout with 62.9 percent than Republicans, whose turnout was 22.8 percent.

In contrast, last year’s primary was mostly county and municipal elections, and received a turnout of only about 13.9 percent of all registered voters in the county.

Arkoosh called preparations for the primary “pretty hectic” as she described some “last minute scrambling” to include the addition of U.S. Senate candidate Joseph Vodvarka on the ballots for Tuesday’s primary.

The addition came as the state Supreme Court ordered the Democrat who fought the challenge to his nominating petition that ousted him from the ballot. The order reversing the Commonwealth Court’s decision came Tuesday, after 300 of the county’s voting machines had already been delivered to their locations.

“We immediately began recalling the machines and printing the stickers to place on the machines and the absentee ballots. As soon as the stickers were completed late Tuesday afternoon, we began applying the stickers to the machines still in the warehouse,” Arkoosh said.

Stickers had to be printed and affixed to the county’s 1,050 machines. Chief Operating Officer for the county, Lauren Lambrugo, said that the county was still calculating the cost of overtime for employees to update the machines, along with the cost of the stickers, which she said would be minimal.

A second last minute change on the ballots came Thursday as a ballot question was removed to appear on the general election ballot in November. The measure, if passed, would have extended the required retirement age of Pennsylvania judges from 70 to 75. The Associated Press reported that state legislators argued that the wording of the question should be changed so that it does not specify the current age of retirement for judges.

The change came too late for county workers to once again alter the ballots for Tuesday. Instead, notices will appear inside the voting booths that state “Any votes cast on Ballot Question 1 in the primary will not be counted.”