The "No" votes win in North Penn School District
About 10,000 "no" votes vs. a little under 8,000 "yes" votes are the (still unofficial) results
The “no” votes against the proposed North Penn Reimagined plan won at the ballot box yesterday.
Despite bleak weather and dangerous road conditions, there was a steady stream of voters yesterday at Gwynedd Square Elementary School. Many of the voters I talked to seemed to be voting “no.” Ever since mail-in voting became a “thing”, however, it’s typical to get more Republicans than Democrats in-person at the polls. This gives a skewed in-person impression of the overall vote count. (For me personally it means I deal with more cranky people and less friendly people at my volunteer job talking to people at the polling place!)
When the mail-in votes were added to the in-person vote, the results were 44% for “yes” and 55% for “no.” The votes yet to be counted are provisional ballots (such as voters who surrendered their mail-in ballots at the polls and voted in-person instead, or voters who were accidentally excluded from the rolls,) plus overseas and military ballots.
It is refreshing in today’s polarized environment that voting on this issue was not split by political party. Regardless of party, I saw voters who were leaning both “no” and “yes.”
Here’s the up-to-date result on the Montgomery County website.
And here’s the article in The Reporter about the results.
I personally feel the “no” vote is short-sighted for the future, in which our already-old high school is going to be really old and limiting - and renovating it then will only be even more expensive in today’s dollars. However, there were many equally valid reasons to vote “no,” such as higher taxes, not wanting to add to the student population of an already-large school, not wanting 9th graders to be moved from where they are now, and worries that the cost of the construction in today’s inflationary environment would outpace the bond issue amount.
While I was listening to voters, I was struck by rationales for a “no” vote that didn’t seem so obvious at first.
The first was the feeling that the North Penn School District offers a good value for the money in its current state — property values and tax rates, while climbing, are still moderate compared to, say, Lower Gwynedd or Upper Dublin, and yet the schools are excellent. Some voters felt that making North Penn High School into a contemporary, spacious building would improve property values too much, thus limiting the access of people like themselves to buy houses in the North Penn School District in the future.
Another rationale for voting “no” was that, if the school district is going to float a large bond, the money should be used to improve pay for teachers, and/or hire more teachers, rather than to improve the building. I have a lot of sympathy for this persuasive argument, which I heard repeatedly from Republicans.
Thanks to every one of you who cared about this issue enough to wade through the sometimes difficult-to-understand information and thoughtfully consider your vote. And thanks to everyone who braved the bad weather yesterday to make your voice heard and make our democracy work. It’s wonderful we live in an area where people can come together peacefully to vote on issues of mutual concern.
This is what democracy is all about.
Hi Faith, one clarification I have is that provisional ballots are not given to voters who bring in their mail-in ballot and envelope. The voters who do that surrender their mail-in ballot so they can sign the registration book and vote in person using a normal ballot and the scanner. Their votes are counted that night at the county, since they are in the same cohort as all the others who voted in person. Provisional ballots are actually rare (we didn’t have any at UG6 yesterday) and are used in special circumstances where the voter is not listed in the book or are otherwise not legally allowed to sign the book and therefore cannot vote using a standard ballot. UG5 did have one provisional ballot because the person was given a mail-in ballot but the voter said they lost it. In that case the voter was not able to surrender a mail-in ballot and therefore was not legally able to sign the book and vote using the standard ballot and scanner. So in order to vote they filled out a provisional ballot. The county will determine if the voter actually DID mail in their ballot, in which case the provisional ballot will not be counted, or the voter really did lose the ballot and then the provisional ballot will be counted. This is manual process and that’s why it takes longer to count.