After suffering a low turnout during this year’s primary
election, voters bounced back to cast their votes for the general
election on Tuesday.

According to McKean County Director of Elections Judy Ordiway,
voter turnout for the county was a little more than 41 percent.

“The turnout was over 41 percent,” Ordiway said. “It’s a little
better than I expected.”

Ordiway also said the new electronic voting machines worked well
despite problems in the primary election.

“We had no machine problems,” Ordiway said Wednesday.

In the primary election this year in McKean County, turnout was
at a low of 15 percent with a mixture of a lack of interest in the
races and possible fear of the new machines cited as the reason the
turnout was down.

Ordiway had said the Ivontronic voting machines suffered a few
technical difficulties in Hamilton Township and Duke Center during
the primary. Machine failure was the problem in Hamilton Township,
and a faulty “PEB” activator, or Personalized Electronic Ballot,
was the problem in Duke Center.

However, on Tuesday night the “PEB” activators and machines were
working just fine, and no one seemed to have a problem using the
machines, though turnout seemed to be low at the voting machine
demonstrations held before the election.

Workers at the Third Precinct, Second Ward, poll in the City of
Bradford said Tuesday night they did have some voters who were
nervous about using the electronic machines and added that the most
time-consuming aspect of the day was trying to explain the steps to
most of the voters.

In Sixth Ward’s, First Precinct, election workers said the
electronic machines were no problem at all and people were
surprised at how easy to use they were.

Ordiway said last week that with all of the demonstrations held
at area senior centers in Bradford, Eldred, Smethport, Port
Allegany, Kane and Mount Jewett during the week of Oct. 9, turnout
was low overall.