Results

I went back and forth on the Scranton mayoral race.  At first, I thought there was no way Liz Randol could beat Bill Courtright.  Then, Courtright stumbled.  He never really expressed a vision for the city.  It was shown he wasn't following proper procedure in the tax collector's office.  Randol was peaking, in spite the "lost gun" controversy.  I really thought she had a great chance of winning Tuesday night.  Courtright wins, and it really wasn't all that close.

It appears Randol won the Republican write-in nomination, setting up a re-match for the fall.  In spite of Courtright's anemic numbers, he's the huge favorite.

A note to the Luzerne and Lackawanna county Republican parties:  there are several offices ripe for the picking.  The inability to field a substantial slate of candidates is sad.  Competition makes everyone stronger.

Patti Rieder's face was everywhere during the campaign.  There was apparently a lot of money to spend.  Rieder had volunteers at every polling place I visited yesterday.  It wasn't enough.  Jim Gibbons, a magistrate from the Abingtons, captured both the Democratic and Republican nominations in Lackawanna County Tuesday night.  Gibbons gets the black robe in January, possibly sooner.

Alleged wiretapper, Luzerne County controller Walter Griffith, survived his fight for the Republican nomination.  It was a little closer than a lot of people thought.  Whether he's electable in November is a much different story.

George Skumanick wanted his old job back.  He was hammered in the race for the Republican nomination for district attorney in Wyoming County.  Skumanick came under fire several years ago for bringing charges against some high school students in a sexting scandal.  He didn't have much of a choice if you carefully read the way the law was written.

Lackawanna County voters decided to form a government study commission, but rejected the move to get rid of some needless row offices.  They'll be talking about this one for a long time.  The government study commission is no surprise.  But, I didn't expect the row offices to remain.  They cost a lot of money, and they were formed back in the days of longhand entry into ledger books.  In a climate of change, voters chose the "same old."  It appears the governing factor is voters want a say in who works in county government, rather than power brokers rewarding the appointed few.

Luzerne County's web site crashed last night.  It did not affect the vote count, just the distribution of the numbers.  It's 2013.  This shouldn't happen.