By John Estridge
There are many firsts with the Tuesday, Nov. 3, election in Franklin County.
There was a 77.4 percent voter turnout. That demolishes any election turnout in recent history within the county.
Clerk Neysa Raible, her employees, election employees and volunteers had the final results ready just a little more than two hours after polls closed. Again, that is a remarkable record in a general election, which includes the presidential election.
And it may be almost impossible for another Democratic candidate to be elected for any county office in the foreseeable future.
To start with the first fact: voter turnout. According to the final results, 12,148 FC residents voted. There are 15,702 registered voters in the county. As a point of reference, the 2016 presidential election was also hotly contested. In Franklin County, 11,233 people voted out of 18,784 registered voters or a percentage of 59.8 percent.
The votes were broken down to 1,276 by absentee votes; 3,603 walk-in absentee and 7,269 who voted on election day.
Next, Raible completed getting the results for election night during the delayed primary election in record breaking time. That was with a pandemic.
She is still facing the same pandemic and many would say it is worse now than it was in June. But she and all of her employees, volunteers and all who helped with the election had all of those people voting by absentee, early voting and then on election day.
But the final results were in just after 8 p.m. That is remarkable and unheard of in light election turnouts without pandemics to deal with.
Then, there is another Republican sweep of the county offices. With the surveyor’s office going Republican, there are no more Democrats in office in the county. One has to look no farther than the straight-party ticket votes for the reason this is so. There were 4,483 Republican straight-party ticket votes compared to 550 for the Democrats and five for Libertarians.
That means every Republican candidate for a county-wide seat gets an almost 4,000-vote head start. That is virtually impossible for any Democratic candidate to overcome.
There were some tight races, but they were for the Franklin County Community School Corporation Board of Trustees races and Brookville town races.
Only one Democrat won in a contested race in Brookville or for that matter in the county as a whole. While the straight-party tickets are not broken down to within Brookville corporate limits as compared to outside Brookville town limits, there has to be quite a few straight-party votes within the corporation bounds.
With all that, Democratic incumbent Gina Gillman was able to narrowly hang onto her position as the town’s clerk-treasurer by gaining 634 votes to Republican challenger Derrike Kolb’s 610, a difference of 24 votes. Percentage-wise it was 50.96 percent for Gillman and 49.04 percent for Kolb.
All the other contested races within the town and the county were taken by Republicans. School board races are not by party affiliation.
And the school board races were good.
Justin Moore won a crowded five-person field for District 3. Moore gained 460 votes or 25.67 percent of the votes. Next was Randall Bolos, who is also the Connersville Police Department Chief. He had 418 votes or 23.3 percent of the votes. Incumbent Phil Harsh came in third with 409 votes or 22.82 percent. Fourth was Bradley J. Hahn with 320 or 17.86 percent and, in fifth, was Dustin S. Robinson with 185 votes or 10.32 percent.
In District 2, incumbent Ricky Gill gained 935 votes or 51.4 percent of the vote. Recent Franklin County High School graduate Kyle Seibert was second with 620 votes or 34.08 percent, and third was Mike Kuehn who had 14.51 percent of the vote.
Secret R. Brougher had an uncontested race in District 1 as did Grant Reeves in District 4. Brougher finished with 1,048 votes, and Reeves had 1,568 in his district.
Back to Brookville Town Council races:
In Ward 3, Republican Charles “Chuck” Campbell had 718 votes (58.66 percent) while Democrat Darrel Flaspohler, a former council member, finished with 506 votes (41.34 percent). It was an open seat with no incumbents.
In Ward 1, which is another open seat, Republican Brooke Leffingwell had 874 votes (70.48 percent) to Democrat Gary “Gig” Marmouze’s 366 votes (29.52 percent).
Incumbent Republican Curtis Ward did not have an opponent in Ward 5. He had 1,000 votes.
There were two contested county races.
For County Council At-Large, the three Republicans won a four-person race. Incumbent Glen Bischoff had the most votes in the race with 7,582 (32.24 percent). Next were Carroll Lanning’s 6,830 votes (29.05 percent). Lanning is a former county council member. Brian Patterson gathered 6,281 (26.71 percent) to take the final at-large seat. Democrat Christina Chappelow Persson had 2,822 votes (12 percent). The three top vote totals won the election.
In the surveyor’s race, Republican Rob Seig had 8,977 votes or 78.2 percent while Democrat Glenn Bailey finished with 2,503 votes (21.8 percent).
For many decades, Democrat Joe Gillespie Jr., held the surveyor’s position. When he retired, fellow Democrat Nathan Meyer won the surveyor’s position. Meyer tragically died while in office. Democrats then chose Bailey to take his place. And he held the position until this election.
All other county offices up for election this time were uncontested. Winning for the Republicans and their office are: Clay M. Kellerman, Judge of the Circuit Court 37th District; Hollie R. Maxie, Recorder; Jolene Beneker, Treasurer; and Tom Wilson, County Commissioner District 3.
In the state and federal races within Franklin County, as it might be expected, the Republican candidates won big.
Incumbent Republican President Donald Trump came away with more than 80 percent of the votes, 9,691 to former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2,137 (17.78 percent) and 169 votes for Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian candidate. There were also 21 write-in votes.
Incumbent Republican Eric Holcomb received 8,633 votes (73.02 percent) for Governor to Woody Myers, a Democrat, who finished with 1,690 (14.30 percent), and Donald Rainwater II had 1,499 votes (12.68 percent).
Republican Todd Rokita had 9,144 votes (81.18 percent) for Attorney General while Democrat Jonathan Weinzapfel who had 2,120 votes (18.82 percent).
Incumbent Republican Greg Pence took 9,352 votes (79.22 percent) for Congress from District 6. Democrat challenger Jeannine Lee Lake had 1,988 votes (16.84 percent) while Libertarian Tom Ferkinhoff had 463 votes (3.92 percent). There were two write-in votes.
Republican incumbent State Senator Jean Leising did not have an opponent for District 42. And Republican incumbent State Representative Cindy Meyer Ziemke did not have an opponent for her seat in District 55. The same can be said for incumbent Republican State Representative Randy Lyness in District 68.