Roberts widens lead over Mahoney
With six additional precincts officially counted, state Rep. Larry Roberts (D-South Union) has slightly widened his lead over write-in challenger Timothy S. Mahoney to 586 votes, according to figures from the Fayette County Election Bureau. With 17 of the 34 precincts in the 51st Legislative District officially counted, Roberts has 1,451 votes for the Democratic nomination and Mahoney has 865. The recently counted precincts include Nicholson Township 1, 2 and 3 and the single-precinct boroughs of Ohiopyle, Smithfield and South Connellsville.
On the Republican side, Harry E. Albert III has 597 votes, while Mahoney has garnered 174 write-in votes for the GOP nomination that he wasn’t pursuing. However, Mahoney is closely watching his combined total, which has reached 1,039, in case he has to run against Roberts in November as an independent.
Although the official count has reached the halfway point in terms of number of precincts, election bureau workers still must count votes in South Union Township 1, 2 and 3, as well as seven wards in the city of Uniontown.
Those constitute comparatively big areas, vote-wise, as do the remaining Wharton Township 1 and 2 precincts. Smaller precincts still awaiting official count are Springfield Township 1 and 2, Springhill Township 1 and 2, and Stewart Township.
As of the latest official tally, Roberts had officially received 52 percent of the 2,790 votes he unofficially got on election night. By comparison Albert, who like Roberts was listed on the ballot, had officially received only 39.5 percent of the 1,511 unofficial votes he got on election night.
The election bureau is hoping to complete the official count by Friday.
Roberts is a six-term incumbent who succeeded in knocking Mahoney off the Democratic ballot via a court challenge to Mahoney’s statement of financial interests. Mahoney subsequently switched his voter registration to independent so he could run against Roberts in the fall.
However, the newly formed Democrats for Good Government, headed by Vincent Zapotosky, mounted an aggressive write-in campaign on Mahoney’s behalf in the April 27 election. Zapotosky said the group was about giving Democrat voters a choice.
Albert, a former Fayette County commissioner who’s mounting a comeback bid, was unopposed for the Republican nomination in a district where the GOP feels it stands a good chance of ending decades of Democratic dominance.