Category: election

Director says there could be more added

Elaine Blaisdell Cumberland Times-News

OAKLAND — Steven Fratz, director of the Garrett County Board of Elections, provided the county commissioners with an update on a list of seven questions that will be on November’s general election ballot and encouraged voters to review the questions ahead of time.

“It’s going to be a very long ballot; it might be 18 inches both sides,” said Fratz during the commission meeting on Tuesday. “It may be even bigger than that because there’s seven questions. Several of the questions are lengthy and, with that many questions, it could delay voting.”

Fratz said there may be more questions added and that everyone will receive a specimen ballot with a summary of the questions.

The specimen ballot will be mailed 10 days before early voting begins on Oct. 27.

“We are going to go above and beyond to get (the specimen ballot) out there so we don’t have delays on Election Day,” said Fratz. “Read those summaries so that you don’t have to read the whole question going into the election.”

Chairman Jim Raley said that he had noticed an intense media campaign for question No. 7, which deals with a proposed casino in Prince George’s County.

“There has been a heavy lobbying effort because of the jobs created and all those kinds of things,” said Raley, noting that there also has been heavy lobbying efforts against No. 7. “It’s become probably one of the most publicized of the questions right now even though we know there are numerous other questions on there that were a result of some Western Maryland challenges.”

No. 7 started out as a question regarding only table games and then the state adopted the Prince George’s casino referendum onto that, said Fratz.

Questions No. 1 and 2 deal with orphan court judges who want to be lawyers in Baltimore and Prince George’s counties, according to Fratz.

Question No. 3 deals with when an elected official should be suspended or removed from office.

Question No. 4 involves in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and No. 5 is about the Congressional redistricting plan, according to Fratz.

Question No. 6 deals with the Civil Marriage Protection Act.

“I think the people of Garrett County will be interested in that,” said Fratz.

Fratz said the new online voter registration systems, which was introduced by the state elections board several weeks ago, has received positive reviews so far.

“Everything can be done online to register to vote,” said Fratz. “It’s connected live with the MVA (Motor Vehicle Administration) so they (applicants) don’t have to sign the registration as long as their information is exactly the same as it is on their driver’s license.”

The Board of Elections processed 456 registration applications for the month of August, according to Fratz.

“Which is quadruple what we normally would do,” said Fratz.

The number of active voters in Garrett County is at 18,343, an all-time high, according to Fratz.

“That will climb probably a couple hundred extra before we hit the general election,” said Fratz.

Also at record high is the number of unaffiliated voters (2,000), according to Fratz.

Registration for voting closes Oct. 16 at 9 p.m. Early voting starts Oct. 27 and ends Nov. 1 and can be completed at the Oakland Community Center or the old armory.

The ballot includes four local candidates — two incumbents and two challengers — for at-large spots on the Board of Education, according to Fratz. 

For more information on voting, view the website at http://www.co.garrett.md.us/Elections/Elections.aspx.

Contact Elaine Blaisdell at eblaisdell@times-news.com.

More here.

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>AEGIS EDITORIAL

July 12, 2011 | 2:44 p.m.

Harford County recently announced it received two Achievement Awards from the National Association of Counties for initiatives undertaken in the last year. It’s kind of like the board game Risk, wherein players roll dice and move armies as they vie with fellow players to take over the world, territory by territory.

It’s the decennial election district reapportionment process, which began in Harford County with an unusual political skirmish. In the past, the county council district lines were drawn, as per usual based on new numbers from the latest U.S. Census, by a commission consisting of political appointees, Republicans and Democrats.

This time, however, in part because the local Democratic Party’s leadership was asleep at the switch, Democratic voter participation in the most recent council election was such that no Democrat is on the commission. That fight, at this juncture, is in the background, however, as the county’s three-member redistricting commission put forth five versions of county council district maps, narrowed from 20 initially devised. The idea in drawing these district maps is to bunch together voting precincts in such a way that each of six geographic areas is represented by as close to the exact same number of people as is possible, thus preserving the principle of one vote, one person.

The fights arise because certain precincts are reliably Republican, and others dependably Democratic, and the parties have an interest in diluting the opposition’s stronghold precincts while maximizing the influence of their own. Thus we encounter districts that look like salamanders and are named for this acrobatic creature, as well as the politician from the early days of the Republic, Elbridge Gerry.

Such slithering districts are said to be gerrymandered. They’re easy to spot on a map. They’re the districts that slither across vast territories for no apparent geographical reason – not unlike Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District that
stretches from Garrett County through the northern half of Harford County.

More here.

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By The Associated Press • November 4, 2010

OAKLAND, Md. — Garrett County voters have fulfilled the wish of a county commissioner candidate who passed away 12 days before the election.

The local election board said Thursday that Republican Bob Gatto won a write-in campaign to succeed the late Dennis Glotfelty on the board of commissioners.
Glotfelty was a Republican whose name remained on the ballot despite his death. Local GOP officials initially urged people to vote for Glotfelty so the party could nominate his successor after the election.

The party later endorsed write-in candidate Gatto, the runner-up in the GOP primary. Glotfelty’s family says that was what Glotfelty wanted.

Gatto got more than 4,000 votes, Democrat Bill Welch got about 2,600 and Glotfelty got nearly 1,800.

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Nov. 4, 2010

Local political history was made this week, as a write-in candidate actually won an election, specifically the Garrett County District 3 commissioner’s race.

Official write-in Republican contender Bob Gatto received more than 4,000 of the 4,352 write-in votes that were cast in Tuesday’s general election.

Republican Tim Thomas and Democrat George Falter, together, received the remainder of those write-in votes.

Democrat Bill Welch had 2,603 votes, or about 30 percent, and the late Commissioner Denny Glotfelty, a Republican, garnered 1,755 votes, or 20 percent, in the District 3 race.

After ballots were cast on Tuesday, Garrett County Board of Elections judges only knew the number of write-in votes that were cast in that race. They did not know exactly who received how many of those votes until after they canvassed the ballots line by line. That procedure began at 10 a.m. this morning (Thursday, Nov. 4).

Board director Steve Fratz announced the results at noon today.

Glotfelty defeated Gatto, Thomas, and Louis Newcomb in the September primary. The one-term incumbent received about 41 percent of the votes, while Gatto had 32 percent, Newcomb had 16 percent, and Thomas had 11 percent of the Republican votes.

On the Democratic side, Welch defeated Falter by garnering 76 percent of his party’s primary votes.

Glotfelty died on Oct. 21, leaving a quandary for the Garrett County Republican Central Committee and local voters. Since the candidate’s death occurred so closely to the general election, Glotfelty’s name could not actually be removed from printed absentee and electronic ballots. In addition, the committee had only a few hours to come up with a Republican candidate who would essentially replace Glotfelty. Rather than “hastily making such a decision” about filling such “big shoes,” the committee asked residents to vote for Glotfelty “one more time” to show their support for him.

After receiving the support of the Glotfelty family, Gatto filed as a write-in candidate on Oct. 25. Following that endorsement and some public backlash for their previous lack of action, the current central committee backed Gatto.

Thomas filed as a write-in on Oct. 26, and Falter filed on Sept. 27.

There were no major surprises in other local races, as Republican candidates easily defeated their Democratic challengers. Registered GOP voters outnumber Democrats by about three to one in Garrett County.

Read the rest here.

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