Tuesday, May 20 will be the Spring 2025 Primary Election in Pennsylvania. This edition of The Express contains a variety of information about the candidates you may encounter on your ballot -- and more articles have been published throughout the days leading up to this point as well, which you can find on our website, www.lockhaven.com.
It is common and trite to encourage voters to educate themselves ahead of the election. However, we wanted to take a moment to specifically highlight the importance of educating yourself for this election in particular, as this cycle is featuring an abnormally high number of write-in candidates throughout the region -- at least compared to previous cycles that the current news staff have experienced.
Some of those candidates have announced their campaigns in The Express. Some have not. We can't speculate on why it seems like there is an unusually high number of write-ins -- but what we can tell you is that the presence of write-in campaigns will complicate the job of you, the voter, because in order to do your due diligence, you will need to familiarize yourself not only with the candidates on the ballot but also those off of it.
As always, registered Independents in the state of Pennsylvania are not able to vote in our "closed primary" system -- so those folks will have a somewhat easier time of it in November's general election…at the cost of not being able to vote Tuesday and inform the choices on the fall ballot.
For everyone else, do your research -- and be patient when looking for results, especially for the local races which feature write-ins, as they may be delayed while the write-ins are tallied.
This election cycle features many row offices and township supervisor positions, as well as multiple seats on local school boards. Of particular note is the race for Clinton County Treasurer between Leslie Clukey and Michelle Kunes, as both candidates are Republicans -- meaning that whichever candidate wins the primary will likely go on to an uncontested win in November, with no Democratic candidate listed.
Candidate interviews with both Clukey and Kunes are included in this edition of The Express.
Please take the time to read up, turn out to vote on Tuesday, and do your civic duty. We are coming out of a bruising election cycle as a country, but this is local election year.
Many of these row offices, supervisors and school board members are frankly more relevant to your day to day lives than the "bigger ticket" representative, senator, president and so on positions that tend to attract more notice -- and more campaign dollars.
This year, it seems like the election has kind of snuck up on us -- perhaps one reason for the volume of write-in candidates -- but it is, in fact, upon us, and we want to encourage all registered Republicans and Democrats to vote in these critically important local elections.