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Voter Registration Deadline

Even though the close of business Monday was the deadline to register to vote in next month’s primary election there is still a little time left. You can ...
lacka voter registration

Even though the close of business Monday was the deadline to register to vote in next month's primary election there is still a little time left.

You can beat the deadline, as long as your application is in the mail and post-marked by midnight.

Tom Gilroy of Moosic was one of the customers Monday at the Lackawanna County Voter Registration Office on Stafford Avenue in Scranton.

He was already registered to vote, but Gilroy is an independent.  He was there to choose a party because independents can't vote in Pennsylvania primaries.

Gilroy didn't decide on a party until he filled out his paperwork.

"It was a real question, which is what it was, as a matter of fact, because there's a presidential race that's important. I would have liked to have voted there, but there are local races, Congressional races," Gilroy said.

So that was Gilroy's issue, register as a Republican so he can choose between Romney and Santorum, or register as a Democrat so he can choose between Congressional candidates Tim Holden and Matt Cartwright.

The flurry of paperwork is only part of the process at the voter registration office. After all that is done, workers there will turn their attention to getting all the voting machines to go out to polling places for the April 24 election.

Lackawanna County has 163 precincts and that's not all. County election workers are doing the paperwork for the people who can't get to the polls.

"We're getting absentee ballots here and processing those on a daily basis. We'll mail out the actual ballots when they're back from the printers," said Director of Elections Marion Medalis.

She added her office has received about 1,000 absentee ballot applications. That's down a bit from the last presidential election.

The deadline to apply for an absentee ballot is April 17.

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