Long days at nearly deserted polls, uncontested races, surprise write-in candidates and the replacement of a mayor gone missing were all part of Monday’s elections in Prince George’s County.
The number of voters making it to the polls was nowhere near triple digits in some communities.
In Edmonston, for example, 11 votes were all it took to return Tracy Farrish to a council position. Only 30 of the town’s 600 registered voters went to the polls, said Tracey Toscano, assistant town clerk.
“For two unopposed seats, it’s not that far off the norm,” Toscano said Tuesday of the turnout.
Jocelyn Armstrong-Fuller, Board of Elections supervisor in Morningside, said she expected only 30 voters but got 51. More than half of those voters wrote in Sharon Fowler’s name to make her a council member.
“They wanted someone who had been living in the community for a long time,” Armstrong-Fuller said, adding that Kerry Thomas Sr., the other candidate who won a council seat, was a newcomer to Morningside. “They’re trying to mix the old and the new together.”
District Heights voters also waged a write-in campaign but failed to return Carol Johnson, who hadn’t appeared at a public meeting since Feb. 2, to the mayor’s office.
Maurice Harris, chairman of the city’s Board of Supervisors of Elections, said the official mayoral candidate, James L. Walls Jr., will be District Heights’ new leader. But more than 600 voters kept election officials so busy that a hamburger Harris brought for lunch almost went uneaten.
“We barely had a chance to eat our lunch,” Harris said. “We had to eat our lunch in shifts.”
