Carbon County voters cast ballots in primary elections

By Sun Advocate

Carbon County voters came to the Feb. 5 polls to cast ballots in the largest national primary election ever conducted on Tuesday.
Republicans in the county went with the candidate supported by the majority of the state, while the Democrats voted for the runner up in the state election.
Republican Mitt Romney received 1,017 votes in the county or 80.52 percent of the local ballots cast in the closed Republican primary.
The Republicans in Utah as a whole cast nearly 90 percent of the party’s votes for the former Massachusetts governor and the man who took over the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002, managing to resurrect what seemed to a failing enterprise.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton came in with a commanding 1,040 votes in Carbon County or 56.43 percent of the local Democratic ballots cast.
But statewide, Democrats supported Barack Obama as the candidate garnered 57 percent of the primary votes in Utah.
Few political analysts would have disputed that Romney, almost an adopted son of the state, would win Utah’s primary election.
But few political analysts predicted that Obama would beat Clinton on the Democratic ballot in Utah.
United States Senator John McCain from Arizona, often considered a friend of Utah, registered 143 votes in Carbon County.

Nationwide, McCain took a large lead in the number of delegates over his closest rival, Romney.
Other candidates running the Republican primary in the county receiving votes included Mike Huckabee with 60, Ron Paul with 28, Rudy Giuliani with 12 and Fred Thompson with three.
Obama, who garnered 38.42 percent of the Democratic primary votes cast in Carbon County, came in with a total of 708 local ballots.
Statewide, Obama garnered 69,638 votes in Utah’s Democratic primary election compared to Clinton’s 48,413 ballots.
Other Democratic candidates that received votes at the local polls included John Edwards with 64, Joe Biden with 12, Bill Richardson with nine, Dennis Kucinich with four and Frank Lynch and Christopher Dodd with three each.
Few problems were reported at the polls, but apparently some people got upset about the closed primary the Republican’s were running.
“We, nor the state, determine what the parties do with their primaries,” said Carbon County Clerk Bob Pero on Wednesday morning. “We are just the messengers of what they want done. We only administer the voting process.”
To have voted Republican in the primaries, one needed to be a registered Republican or be unaffiliated and then declare to be a Republican. The Democratic side of the election was not closed and unaffiliated people could vote in that primary.
The turnout in some of the polling stations was high, but of the 15,365 registered voters in the county, only 3130 or 20.37 percent actually voted in the primary.
Alexis Horsley, assistant county clerk, said that the vote total released on Tuesday night would not be official until the canvas was done in a few days.
The turnout for the general election that will take place on Nov. 4 is expected to be much higher than the primary, because not only will the presidential race between the eventually Republican and Democratic nominees be on the ballot, but many local offices will also be up for grabs.