CLEARFIELD – The full results are in for Clearfield County. At 12:32 a.m. Wednesday, the final count was recorded after a long night for election workers.
“I think what slowed it down a lot was the extremely high amount of absentee ballots,” said Clearfield County Commissioner Rex Read.
“It went very smoothly, it just took longer.”
A total of 1,530 absentee ballots had to be counted before the results of the electronic ballots cast at poll locations could be counted. Read said voter turnout for the mid-term election was especially good with 52 percent of those registered voting.
Another problem was that the election board learned late in the day that the absentee ballots had to be counted and entered before the electronic ballots could be counted. Absentee ballots cannot be opened and processed until the polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday, because, as Read said, “There is always the possibility that someone could come in who submitted an absentee.”
As a result of the processing problem experienced Tuesday night, only one round of results was released, that being the final count of all votes. The original plan was to release three waves of votes, one when 25 precincts were counted, one when 50 were counted, and one when all of the county’s 71 precincts were counted.
Full election results for Clearfield County can be found here.
