With all votes counted in Yellowstone County by Wednesday morning, Mark Morse won as expected for a seat on the County Commission.Â
Morse received 41,077 votes for 89.4% of the votes cast. Write-in candidates received 4,871 votes, 10.6 %. Presumably most of the write-in votes went to Denis Pitman, the incumbent commissioner who who mounted a write-in campaign after losing in the primary to Morse.
Delays in ballot processing late in to the night Tuesday following lines of voters at MetraPark waiting to cast ballots when polls closed at 8 p.m. meant immediate results were unavailable for most of election night. Â
This was the first election run in Yellowstone County without longtime election administrator Bret Rutherford, who resigned last month. Overseeing the election on Tuesday was interim director Kevin Gillen, a retired county attorney.
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Along with Gillen was the county's newly hired election administrator Ginger Aldrich, who will take over after the election.Â
It was a unique race. Morse beat Pitman, the incumbent, in the Republican primary in June for a seat on the commission. Over the summer, Pitman decided to run as a write-in candidate in an effort to hold onto his seat.Â
Both candidates waited Tuesday night for results that took hours longer than usual to arrive. Morse's was the only name on the ballot for the county commissioners race. In order to cast a ballot for Pitman, voters had to write-in his name.Â
The race drew attention not only for being a first-time attempt at a serious write-in campaign in Yellowstone County, but for one of the names Pitman submitted to the county election office.Â
Penis Ditman, the spoonerized version of his name that kids shouted at him in middle school, was one of 30 variants of Pitman's name that, should it be written on the ballot, would count as a vote for Pitman.Â
Morse announced his candidacy nearly a year ago, a response to the growing controversy over the process county commissioners were using to look at privatizing management at MetraPark.Â
Pitman and Commissioner Don Jones had moved relatively quickly to figure out a deal on management privatization and had been accused of having their minds made up about the outcome.
It left a bad taste in Morse's mouth and so he ran in the June primary against Pitman. Voters appeared to express the same frustration and chose Morse over Pitman twice.Â