Luzerne County preparing list of open seats for primary

Luzerne County interim Election Director Andrea Hill urges residents to pay attention to the seats that are up for grabs in the upcoming primary.

“If more candidates get on the ballot, it will alleviate the need to process as many write-in votes,” Hill said Wednesday.

The tallying of write-in votes is more cumbersome for the county Election Board and election bureau, particularly with now-popular mail voting. Instead of typing write-in selections on electronic ballot marking devices at polling places, mail voters must write them in by hand.

If the penmanship is unclear, election board members must enlarge the name on a projected screen to get a closer look and debate the intended spelling.

Misspellings and the use of nicknames also slow the tally, and candidates must come forward if they want credit for different variations of their name — a process known as cumulating, officials have said.

The election bureau also must invest additional resources tracking down all write-in winners to find out if they want to accept the nomination and verify they are registered voters in the jurisdiction where they were chosen, said county Administrative Services Division Head David Parsnik.

Hill said she’s finding a large number of office holders and citizens who may be interested in seats unaware of which ones must be filled by voters this year.

Parsnik said the bureau will publicly post a complete list of all seats set to appear on the May 18 primary election ballot, likely by the middle of next week.

This list could not be released sooner because the county had to wait for all school districts and municipalities to provide that information, Parsnik said.

For now, county officials encourage residents to contact their municipality or school district if they are interested in which seats are open at the local level.

Candidates can seek nomination petition signatures between Feb. 16 and March 9 — a step required to appear on the primary ballot.

Petition packets are available for all prospective candidates at the election bureau on the second floor of the county’s Penn Place Building, which is located at the corner of Market Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Wilkes-Barre.

The bureau is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., although Hill asks candidates to arrive at 4:15 p.m. to ensure everyone can be served while allowing for social distancing inside the office.

Additional material on election requirements is included.

“All the information they need is in the packets,” Hill said.

Nominees for hundreds of vacant seats will be selected in the upcoming primary, Hill said.

In addition to school board and municipal tax collector seats, the ballot will include many municipal mayor and council/supervisor openings, Hill said.

Also on the ballot: constables, 186 judge of election seats and 372 inspector of election seats, she said.

Countywide, voters will select Republican and Democratic nominees for five county council seats, the county controller and two county Court of Common Pleas judge openings. Judge candidates typically cross-file to run on both the Republican and Democratic ballots in the primary, which means there could be anywhere from two to four nominees advancing to the November general election.