Early voting in West Virginia has broken records in the 2016 election cycle with numbers surpassing historical data for both the primary and general elections in years past.
According to data provided by the Secretary of State’s office, 220,275 voters cast early ballots in the 2016 general election. The early voting period ended Saturday, Nov. 5.
During the 2012 general election, there were 150,666 early voters. In 2008, there 153,096 West Virginians cast early ballots.
This year’s primary election in May also yielded record breaking numbers, with 100,926 ballots cast early. In 2012’s primary that number was 46,833 early votes. The 2008 primary, 57,553 West Virginians voted early.
Early voting in West Virginia began in the 2002 election cycle. This year’s 10-day early voting period broke records despite being reduced from a 20-day period in the 2010 election cycle.
“As we near the end of this election cycle, it is clear that West Virginians are excited about voting,” Secretary of State Natalie Tennant said in a Monday news release.
“Early voting is convenient and gives voters with busy schedules more opportunities to cast a ballot. I am pleased to see such record-breaking turnout, and hope West Virginians continue that momentum by getting out and setting even more voter turnout records on Election Day.”
In a breakdown of early votes cast by registrants for each party, the Secretary of State’s Office reports 98,547 Democrats, 81,263 Republicans, 613 Libertarians, 184 Mountain Party members and 33,173 ballots by voters with no party affiliation were cast during the early voting period.
The county’s with the highest percentage of registered voters casting early ballots are:
On the morning of April 29, a natural gas transmission line exploded in a field in Salem Township in western Pennsylvania. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape, burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius and threw a 25-foot section of the 30-inch steel pipeline 100 feet away. At the time of the explosion, a 26-year-old man was in his house, a few hundred feet away. He was badly burned, and his home destroyed.
When local fire chief Bob Rosatti arrived at the scene, the flames were so hot, he had to stay in his truck.
“They were massive—I would say 300 feet at the least,” Rosatti says. “That was the biggest fireball I’d ever seen in my life. Thank god it was in a rural area. It could have been a lot worse if it had been in a more populous area.”
Investigators think external corrosion on the pipe is to blame for the blast. But they are still poring over a decade’s worth of pipe inspection reports to determine exactly what caused it.
The explosion comes as the federal government is undertaking a new effort to make gas transmission pipelines safer. It has become an even more urgent issue now that the country is building more pipelines, especially in the Northeast. The fracking boom in the Marcellus and Utica shales is a big reason for that. The Department of Energy predicts Pennsylvania and Ohio will nearly double their natural gas production by 2030.
These natural gas transmission lines carry gas at high pressure across long distances. Currently, there are 300,000 miles of these lines in the U.S. And many residents who live in the path of these new pipelines are asking if they should be worried about accidents like the one in Salem Township.
“They need to find a safe way to move gas,” says Lisa Segina, a Salem Township resident who leases her land for $20 a year to a company that stores gas under her property. “I understand we need it, we need energy. But there are safe ways to do it.”
Credit Reid Frazier / Allegheny Front
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Allegheny Front
Two men walk the scene of a natural gas transmission line explosion in western Pennsylvania, April 29, 2016. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape and burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius.
Segina says what upsets her the most is how long it took for the company to shut off the gas in the pipeline after the explosion.
“It was active for almost 55 minutes before they were able to shut it down, because someone had to drive 15 miles to shut this valve off,” she says.
Officials from Spectra Energy, the company operating the pipeline, declined to be interviewed for this story. But in an email, company spokesman Creighton Welch says the industry standard is to shut off pipelines within an hour of any incident. He says the company also performed all federally mandated inspections—including an in-line inspection (ILI) in 2012, which tests the strength of the pipe from the inside. According to Welch, that inspection “revealed no areas requiring repair or remediation before the next inspection.”
Overall, pipelines have steadily gotten safer over the past few decades—though more than 300 serious pipeline incidents have resulted in 132 deaths in the past decade, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Suburban Pittsburgh resident Rob Brown is among those who are uncomfortable with his home’s proximity to a pipeline. Brown lives in Murraysville, where Dominion Transmission wants to put a large natural gas pipeline through his property, about 200 feet from his back door. When Brown first heard about the pipeline, he thought about moving. News of the explosion jolted him—and raised the alarm for people in his suburban neighborhood.
“Something like that happens to a neighbor, the word spreads,” Brown says. “It’s not safe. There’s a definitely a risk.”
But Frank Mack, a spokesperson for Dominion Transmission, says that—by the numbers—moving natural gas via pipeline is the safest form of energy transportation in the U.S.—far safer than transporting other fuels by rail or truck. He says the company uses various methods, including aerial and ground inspections, to keep its pipelines safe.
Earlier this year, the federal agency in charge of pipeline safety proposed new rules that add more protections for areas like Brown’s Murraysville neighborhood. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) proposed the rules in response to a 2010 explosion in San Bruno, California that killed eight people. A draft of the new rule noted that “the nation’s existing, and in many cases, aging, pipeline system is facing the full brunt of this dramatic increase in natural gas supply and the shifting energy needs of the country.”
As the rules are currently written, pipelines in densely populated areas undergo the most stringent safety inspections. But the agency is proposing to extend some of these protections to suburban and less-populated areas. PHMSA also wants to add more pressure testing for older lines. A separate rule could mandate increased use of automatic shutoff valves, which would have stopped the Salem Township fire sooner.
PHMSA did not respond to interview requests for this story. But Stacey Gerard, the former safety chief at the agency, says the rate at which the regulators can tighten safety rules for pipelines is slow. She says any new rule must pass a cost-benefit analysis. If the projected costs of imposing the rule outweigh the benefits, the government can’t pass it—even if those benefits include avoiding property damage, injuries and deaths.
For example, a rule that saves a human life must yield a benefit of $9.4 million—an amount determined by a federal government metric known as the “value of a statistical life.” Gerard says that hampers the ability of the agency to impose safety regulations.
“The societal benefit of people being able to sleep at night is hard to quantify,” Gerard says. “We’re not going to get all the improvements we’d like. There are actions the agency would like to make that, if they can’t come out with a positive [cost-benefit] analysis, it won’t make it into the rule.”
Further complicating matters is the fact that most pipelines were built in places that once were rural but are now seeing increased development. Today, more than 12,000 schools in the U.S. are within 1,000 feet of a major natural gas transmission line.
Gerard says decisions about where to site pipelines are often made at the local level, which makes the job of federal safety officers even harder.
“You have the challenge of getting the energy to the people who need it. And for the foreseeable future, we’re a fossil fuel-oriented economy,” she says. “For at least the next 20 years, we have to figure out how to do this safely.”
This story is part of The Allegheny Front’s series Follow the Pipeline, which explores the health and environmental impacts of the region’s expanding natural gas infrastructure. Data visualizations by Dave Mistich, West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Heavy flooding in West Virginia has claimed tens of lives in the state, and Governor Tomblin has declared a state of emergency in 44 of the 55 counties. Use our map to discover some of the communities that were most affected by the storms.
As West Virginia moves toward the May 10 primary, thousands of West Virginians are opening up their wallets and shelling out some major cash for the presidential hopefuls.
But, in terms of dollars, which candidate is winning West Virginia? We look to the latest filings with the Federal Election Commission for the answer.
The Strongholds for Each Candidate
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has seen the highest total number of donations at $170,663. Clinton donations are largely concentrated in the Charleston area and in the Eastern Panhandle. But, she has statewide appeal with donations also coming in from the Morgantown area, the southern coalfields, the Mid-Ohio Valley and the Northern Panhandle.
While Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has seen small donations pouring in from across the state, his financial support is centered in the Morgantown and Wheeling areas. A fundraising event in early April benefited the senator, who did make an appearance. Attended by an estimated 600 people, the event was reportedly sponsored by Robert Murray of Murray Energy.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ donations are spread throughout virtually every part of the state and included a high number of small dollar gifts. Many of his 3,489 donations are for $27, a number he’s touted as the average donation he’s received nationally. His biggest draw is in the Morgantown area, Charleston, the Eastern Panhandle and Huntington.
Ohio Governor John Kasich’s fundraising support not surprisingly is concentrated in parts of West Virginia that touch his home state. West Virginians in Weirton, Mineral Wells and Huntington have pledged their dollars to the governor with pockets of donors in Baker, Summersville and Philippi.
Often referred to as the candidate most likely to take West Virginia in the primary, billionaire businessman Donald Trump’s few donations thus far–37 from 27 contributors–is mostly concentrated in the state’s southern coalfields.
Hover your mouse over an area to see how much money each candidate raised in each zip code. For a deeper look at the presidential candidates’ fundraising in the state, search the map by city or zip code. You can also filter data by candidate by using the drop-down menu on the top right of the dashboard.
Does Any of This Matter?
A candidate’s ability to fundraise often says a lot about how people in a state view them, but does that really equate to votes? Kyle Kondik with the University of Virginia Center for Politics says that may not necessarily be the case this election season.
“Trump has broken a lot of rules this primary race, one of which is that candidate fundraising is typically important for candidates to win,” said Kondik.
If you look at FEC filings, its clear Trump has raised significantly less than his Republican rival, $12 million compared to Cruz’s $78 million, but Kondik points to Trump’s use of “free media,” i.e. television appearances, and his already existent name recognition as reasons that Trump has been able to win while running a campaign “on the cheap.”
“He has been able to win many state and many delegates despite not spending much on television [ads],” Kondik said. “It’s a strategy that other candidates probably would have a hard time replicating.”
As for the Sanders’ camp being able to raise from such a wide swath of West Virginia, Kondik says it points back to the candidate’s reliance on small-donor funding.
“I don’t think the sources of money have much to do with where a candidate does well or does not do well,” he added.
A report released Monday by NPR tracks the amount of money spent on each student across the country by county. But representatives of the West Virginia Department of Education say the data reported doesn’t add up in West Virginia.
NPR and the national publication Education Week attribute their spending numbers to the U.S. Census Bureau. Their map says in West Virginia, McDowell County spent the most at $14,000 per student in 2013. Jefferson County, according to the map, spent the least per pupil at around $8,000.
“The numbers that are reflected in this story do not agree to the data that we have,” she explained, “It says in the story that the data is adjusted for regional cost differences, and it appears there have been additional adjustments made, and we cannot speak as to what those adjustments are.”
Willard says the state Department of Education’s data shows Jefferson County spending over $11,000 per student in 2013, with Hardy County spending the least amount per pupil at $9,700.
County Boards of Education Per Pupil Expenditures for the 2012-2013 Year:
In both cases however, NPR’s data and the state Department of Education show McDowell County spending the most on its students. Willard says this in part has to do with the county receiving a considerable amount of federal funding to spend on education.
“Presumably due to the economic conditions in that county, they are receiving a higher amount of federal funding, which is driving up their overall per pupil expenditures. That appears to be the main reason for the higher expenditures in that county.”
According to the state Department of Education, Doddridge County is the only other county to spend over $14,000 on an individual student per year.
In June of 2007, Victoria Snyder, then age-nine, attended a week-long church camp. During the week she began to feel sick – muscle aches, lethargy, headaches. A doctor at the camp thought it might be the flu, but she didn’t get better. So after camp, her mother, Christine, took her to see a pediatrician.
“The pediatrician found a bullseye ring on her stomach,” said Christine. “I felt a lot of relief when they put her on antibiotics because with Lyme disease, we knew what we were dealing with.”
In 2007, there were only 84 confirmed cases of Lyme Disease in West Virginia – most of which were in the Snyder’s county, Berkeley. Seven years later, that number almost doubled to 136. The next year, 2015, it doubled again.
“The number of cases are increasing,” said West Virginia University pediatric infectious disease specialist Kathy Moffett. “It’s not that we haven’t diagnosed it before, it’s that it hasn’t been here before.”
Moffett said experts think that the mountains in eastern West Virginia have long been a barrier against the ticks (West Virginia’s border states of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia all have high levels of Lyme).
Others disagree, saying Lyme has always been in West Virginia, it just wasn’t well diagnosed.
“I can tell you I don’t think there’s a great wall of West Virginia and all these ticks stop at these borders. It’s rampant in Virginia, it’s rampant in Pennsylvania, it’s rampant here,” said Doctor Erika Pallie, a West Virginia-based physician who used to work for WVU.
“The presumption is that for some reason West Virginia still doesn’t have Lyme disease,” she said. “I would propose this is a self-fulling fallacy. Doctors are told there’s no Lyme disease here, therefore they refuse to test people for it, therefore they don’t find it, therefore they don’t report it.”
Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention registers about 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease each year. More than 96 percent of those cases are being reported in 14 states. (West Virginia does not yet officially make that list, although if trends continue, it might in the coming years.)
The Lyme Controversy
Doctors Pallie and Moffett have both seen and treated Lyme in West Virginia. But they view the disease in very different ways.
Moffett adheres to the Infectious Disease Society of America’s recommended guidelines for Lyme, which basically state that Lyme is hard to get and easy to treat.
Pallie, who has personally had Lyme, believes that the IDSA’s definition of Lyme is too narrow. Rather, she follows guidelines from the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, which state there are more than 100 strains of the bacteria that cause Lyme in the United States. Therefore, a cocktail of antibiotics (rather than a single round of one) may be needed to treat Lyme.
The International Lyme Society’s research has also indicated that the official, primary, test used for the disease is only about 65 percent sensitive. So when possible, Pallie would order a different one. (Other, more sensitive tests are generally not covered by insurance as preliminary screening.)
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A classic bullseye rash, which often indicates Lyme disease.
But Moffett defends the IDSA’s guidelines saying, “[T]hese [guidelines] have been studied very closely and carefully to look at the science behind how accurate these tests are – are they valid and the science says they are valid. There are a minority of people who feel that their disease may not be accurately diagnosed who are looking for answers of symptoms that may have nothing to do with Lyme.”
For several years, those minority of patients flooded Pallie’s clinic in Morgantown.
“When you come down to it, I believe patients have the right to be informed of the risks of their alternative choices,” said Pallie. She said she told her patients “[L]ook this is the deal. This is what you have, this is the infectious disease standard of care and the ILADS standard of care, and these are the risks of this treatment.”
Pallie said eventually her supervisors at WVU asked her to stop diagnosing and treating Lyme or sending out any more specialty tests. Instead, Pallie says, she was instructed to send patients she suspected had Lyme to the infectious disease specialists at WVU.
Pallie says she understands that decision since she was hired as a family doctor, not a Lyme disease specialist. Nevertheless, she resigned from her position at WVU because she thought it was unethical not to treat patients she really did think have Lyme.
Still Sick? It Must Not Be Lyme
For one thing, many of the patients Pallie saw had stories like Victoria Snyder’s. Back in 2007, after her first round of antibiotics, Victoria didn’t get better. By November of that year, Christine took Victoria to an infectious disease specialist in Winchester, Virginia, who recommended that she be admitted to hospital and given six weeks of intravenous antibiotics.
“When she finished the IV antibiotics, she definitely had less of the cloudy thinking – we were just hoping that her energy would catch up,” said Christine.
It never did. Victoria is now 17 and a senior in high school. She tests negative for the bacteria that causes Lyme, but most days, it is all she can do to get out of bed and get through the school day.
Christine said the doctors she took Victoria to said “she was cured of Lyme disease and it was official. They weren’t willing to look into what other issues might be causing the fatigue.”
Christine also said her insurance refused to continue paying for treatments since Victoria no longer tested positive for Lyme. But she doesn’t see how the current health issues Victoria is having could not be related to Lyme. ”Victoria was a normal, high energy, 9-year-old kid. There was a change in her and it has never been the same since she got sick,” she said.
According to the Infectious Disease Society, there is no such thing as chronic Lyme disease. WVU’s Moffett said continuing to treat for Lyme when there’s no evidence of the disease may be masking the true problem. Also, she said, prescribing months of antibiotics may do more harm than good. But for patients like Victoria and doctors like Pallie, the question remains: If they are cured, why are they still sick?
Despite their differences, both Pallie and Moffett agree that Lyme disease is being diagnosed at a higher rate in West Virginia. They also both say that’s it’s preventable and that the best way to tackle Lyme disease is to take steps (such as wearing pants, checking for ticks during the warm months, and wearing bug spray) that keep that the bite from happening in the first place.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.
