May 1, 2014 3 min read

Democratic voters will be getting absentee ballots before their Republican counterparts, but the Washington County elections director said it’s not due to preferential treatment.

The fate of Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Guzzardi was decided Thursday afternoon.

In a 5-2 decision, the state Supreme Court struck the name of Gov. Tom Corbett’s only Republican challenger from the May 20 primary election ballot. A Commonwealth Court judge previously ruled that Guzzardi’s name should remain on the ballot.

Guzzardi, of Ardmore, Montgomery County, and those who claim his nominating petitions weren’t valid submitted legal briefs to the state’s highest court by the April 21 deadline, but the case was in limbo until Thursday’s decision.

Not knowing if the Republican primary ballot should list the names of one or two candidates seeking nomination, elections director Larry Spahr was assuming a wait-and-see posture.

The Washington County elections office has received about 280 absentee ballot requests, far fewer than in April 2012 when 1,600 requests for absentee ballots came in during a presidential election year.

“There hasn’t been much activity at all,” Spahr said of absentee ballot requests and new voter registrations.

The last day to request an absentee ballot for the May 20 primary is May 13. Polls will open at 7 a.m. May 20 and close at 8 p.m.

The Washington County elections office needs more than 1,000 local election board members to carry out election day duties in the 184 precincts across the county.

It is still seeking workers for both West Brownsville’s 2nd precinct and Jefferson Township.

There is a change in voting precinct for some Chartiers Township residents.

Those who formerly voted at the Worstell garage in Chartiers Township’s will be reporting to the Palanka Sportsmen’s Club, 716 N. Main St., Houston. Chartiers’ 4th Precinct will be combined at the club with Chartiers’ 2nd Precinct because the Worstell residence is no longer available.

Meanwhile, on election night, County Commissioner Harlan Shober, who is also a member of the elections board, said he plans to don a reflective vest and work alongside those who are collecting and loading elections equipment on South Franklin Street.

Since the county introduced computerized touch-screen voting machines in 2006, local election boards tend to wrap up more quickly and at about the same time, creating traffic backups around the Courthouse Square office building. The touch-screen machines list write-in votes, a task that election boards tabulated manually when the county used punch-card ballots.

“A few of the people mentioned it takes longer and they’d like to get out quicker,” Shober said Tuesday of election night vehicular traffic. “Between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m., people are all coming in around the same time.

Drive time to Washington, Shober noted, is about the same whether someone is coming from Elco Borough in the Mon Valley or Eldersville in Jefferson Township.

Shober originally hoped to make South Franklin a one-way street just for election night with two incoming lanes for dropping off elections materials, but with trucks of significant width being loaded with voting machines, “the safety issue is something I have to be concerned about,” Shober said. “That’s the priority.”