McGarrigle’s election criticism is way out of line
I take great exception to Delaware County Republic Chairman Tom McGarrigle’s accusation that “Despite the COVID-19 outbreak, counties across the country have been able to effectively hold elections.
Not here in Delaware County where county Democrats have put partisanship ahead of good governance.”
This paper has amply covered the exceptional difficulties Delaware County had in holding the June 2 election, difficulties that were not experienced by other less populous counties in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
First, the change in governing party from Republican to Democrat caused the retirement or resignation of upwards of 50 percent of experienced election bureau and voting machine warehouse workers at the beginning of the year.
Nevertheless, the Election Bureau had to receive, test and demonstrate a whole new system of voting – which requires seven pieces of equipment per polling place – and while it was just getting started on that enormous task, it had to stop because of the coronavirus and concentrate on receiving and recording applications for more than 85,000 mail-in ballots.
It then had to print the ballots (which it could not do until all of the nominating petition challenges were finished) then mail the ballots, the envelop for sealing the ballot and the return envelop to each of those 85,000 voters.
And the workers had to do all that while maintaining social distancing.
They also had to consolidate polling places find new locations for the polling places, and find enough poll workers to man those polls despite the great reluctance of most of the usual volunteers to sit and be breathed on by strangers for 15 hours on Election Day. They even mailed postcards to voters who did not apply for mailin ballots to tell them where their new polling places were.
That required the bureau to devise elaborate sanitation measures and yet another new system at the polling places themselves. The new scanners weren’t used and instead the paper ballots were dropped in ballot boxes and taken to a central location for counting on high-speed scanners. And poll workers only received about an hour’s worth of training to implement that new system.
The election bureau also had to deal with the absurdly tight deadline – May 26 to receive mail-in applications – decreed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, most of whose members come from rural areas and low population counties, who couldn’t have cared less about the travails of a county with a population of 565,000 people on the border with Philadelphia.
“Other counties across the country” simply did not have to deal with this astounding series of difficulties.
For voters in Tioga County (pop. 40,763) or Mifflin County (pop. 46,138), life went on much as before. As of June 5, Tioga County had
19 confirmed COVID cases and two deaths. Mifflin had
59 cases and one death. Their voters could go to their regular polling places and their votes were probably counted election night just as in previous years.
Delaware County had
6,600 COVID cases and 591 deaths. The county was still in the red zone on Election day. It wanted to avoid having people stand for hours in long lines, risking their lives to vote, as had happened in “good governance” Republican-controlled Wisconsin.
I believe that the County Election Board and Election Bureau chief Laureen Hagan, with the help of her workers and other county employees, did the very best they could for all the voters of Delaware County under impossible circumstances. Hagan and county Councilwoman Christine Reuther and Operations Chief Marianne Grace and those workers are superheroes in my book.
Except for a couple of local races, this primary election doesn’t mean much in the long run – the outcome of Donald Trump on the Republican side and Joe Biden on the Democrat side has long been known — but it has been a crucial learning experience for the upcoming presidential general election, which will pose many of the same problems.
One of those lessons is that the Republicans are going to do the very best they can to disrupt the November election and suppress the vote in every way possible because they believe that when fewer people are allowed to vote, they do better.
Philadelphia and its four surrounding counties may very well decide the entire presidential election, so you better hope those counties figure out what needs to be done and how to do it before Nov. 3.
Perhaps Mr. McGarrigle could tell us what the Delaware County would have done in the face of the coronavirus, the new mail-in no excuses system and new voting machines had the Republicans still been in power. Oh yeah, nothing.