WILLISTOWN — At perhaps Chester County’s most famous precinct, there was little if any drama in Tuesday’s voting in the 2021 Municipal Election, according to the local judge of elections.
“Nothing so far,” said David Frank, when asked if there had been any sort of irregularity in the early turnout at Willistown’s South-1 precinct at the Sugartown Elementary School. “We’ve been very smooth. No issues whatsoever.”
A year ago, it was Frank and his son, Eric Frank, who helped identify a township man who voted twice in the presidential election, casting one ballot for himself and another for his son, after being told it was improper to vote more than once in an election under two different names. The man was eventually arrested and charged with repeat voting, and ended up pleading guilty and being prohibited from voting for four years, making headlines across the country.
Frank said that turnout in the polling place, which covers multiple precincts, had been slower than a year ago, with only a handful of voters waiting in line at 7 a.m. when the polls opened. Not only were there few voters waiting, but Frank said he hadn’t seen any outside poll watchers from the political parties in the gymnasium where voting stations were set up.
“I had expected we would have a slew of them, because we’ve been in the news,” he told a reporter.
He said that despite any rancor that exists in elections across the county — for county Row Offices, courts, school boards and municipal positions, there had not been any angry disputes Tuesday. “We have a lot of camaraderie here,” he said. “We take things seriously and by the book.
“My mantra is I am here to make sure that you can vote, and that your vote counts,” Frank said before returning to work.
It will be interesting for observers to see what level of turnout there is at the polls when they close, as national tensions over politics have ratcheted up interest in local elections since 2016. The count of voters participating in the off-year elections has risen steadily, from 22 percent in 2013, to 26 percent in 2015, 31 percent in 2017 and a whopping 40 percent in 2019.
The number of voters in the county has risen as well, with about 20,000 more registered voters this year — 371,870 as of Monday — than in 2019. Democratic voters continue to outnumber Republicans by slightly more than 5,000, and a steady figure of about 67,000 independents and third-party voters.
Chester County Voter Services officials say that there were a significant number of early, or mail-in voters, this year, although hardly a match for the tens of thousands who cast their votes that way in 2020, during the pandemic and the presidential election.
According to Becky Brain, county spokeswoman, 19,908 Democrats had returned their mail-in or absentee ballots as of Friday, along with 6,693 Republicans and 3,161 other voters. The county reported that 51,793 voters had requested such ballots as of the deadline last month.
(Because of printing deadlines Tuesday, the Daily Local News will not carry results from Tuesday’s election in its print edition Wednesday. Results as they are reported can be viewed at https://chester-county-election-portal-chesco.hub.arcgis.com. Check the Daily Local News website, www.dailylocal.com, for results Wednesday morning.)
Poll workers speculated that such voting was a factor in the slow, though steady, pace at their precincts.
“It’s hard to know what our turnout will be because of mail-in voting,” said Linda Scrivner, the judge of elections for the East Goshen-3 precinct at the township Municipal Building. She counted 79 voters casting in-person ballots as of about 9:45 a.m., out of a total of 1,441 voters registered in the precinct. The pace, she said, was “steady, but not overwhelming.”
Standing outside the building in the chilly drizzle, Republican Committeeman Ed Coyle agreed that the number of people arriving to vote was less than it had been, but still steady. ”You can’t sit down for five minutes,” he said handing out campaign literature to those who approached the building. “You do and you have to stand right back up again.”
Both Coyle and Karen Fleming, a Democrat running for the West Chester Area School Board in Region 2, acknowledged that the race for the board had become tense and at times vitriolic, although Fleming said she and her Republican opponent, incumbent board member Brain Gallen, had waged “civil” campaigns.
“My race has been very polite, while other regions have been polarizing,” she said while standing outside the East Goshen polling place. “I think school boards need to be focused on students, learning, and safety, and not politics.”
Coyle, himself a former West Chester school board member, said that he thought the district’s switch from an at-large voting system to a regional one had influenced the amount of issue-laden politics that had crept into the local elections. “It’s hard to find someone qualified to run,” he said. “It’s a thankless position, and someone is always yelling at you. You can’t always get someone from a particular region, to run, and when you do you politicize it more.
“It’s not supposed to be political,” he said.
The way that national politics has affected the local voting was evident on Tuesday. At the East Goshen precinct, one Republican voter who asked not to be identified said that even though she was determined to cast her ballot for the local candidates, her thoughts were elsewhere.
“I’d rather be voting in Virginia,” the woman said, referencing the gubernatorial race there seen as a referendum on the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
At the Willistown school, a sign touting pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Mike Lyndell was reportedly briefly displayed in the lobby before it was noticed by Democratic committee people and removed. “Clean up 2020,” the sign proclaimed, said one witness who asked not to be identified.
Inside the West Chester Borough Hall, where voting in the 2-W precinct was slowly unfolding, new Democratic committeeman Bryan Travis bemoaned how those national issues like Critical Race Theory and remote school sessions were infecting the local political scene.
“Folks just come out to cast their votes today,” he said. “Good things happen at the local level and we don’t need outside influences trying to change things where they don’t live. Once the election is over, they’re gone and we’re living with the decisions.”
To contact staff writer Michael P. Rellahan call 610-696-1544.
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