Talk:2009 Harrisburg mayoral election

End of the Paper Trail (to my knowledge)

To all editors to whom it may concern. This is the end of the paper trail for readily available information on Harrisburg mayoral elections, at least as per the time of me writing this in January of 2023. I have looked extensively for information on the 2005 election but Dauphin country didn't start digitizing their election results until 2007. I'm sure that the election results for all prior Harrisburg mayoral elections exist somewhere collecting dust in some municipal or country government building, but I have neither the time nor the desire to stumble around random local governmental offices asking politely for voting returns from almost two decades ago. Regardless I am going to dump what I did find here in the hopes that someone else has more information available to them to create proper articles.

What information I do know about the 2005 election was that it got some media "coverage" IE: referenced twice, during the 2021 Harrisburg mayoral election. more so for the municipal council election as it saw the two candidates from that election face off against each other for a city council seat.

Sources for this here and here

Additionally the 2005 election has probably the most information on it, mostly due to it being a key part of mayor Stephen R. Reed's corruption investigation in 2015. Apparently he had been using public money to buy civil war and wild west artifacts and then horde them in his office and a conference room in the Harrisburg municipal building. this was apparently public knowledge as the person running against him in the democratic primary, political "amateur," Jason N. Smith, based his entire campaign around how weird it was that the mayor was hording civil war and wild west artifacts in the mayoral office (if I read the article correctly the plan was to make a museum out of the artifacts but this never panned out so he just took them all home with him after he lost in 2009). Going so far as to make a finger puppet of Reed wearing cowboy boots and a hat which he used at campaign rallies. Although reed would beat smith by a 3 to 1 margin, the numbers where never given in any article I could find, and Reed would go on to win the general election unopposed.

sources for this can be found here here and here

Again, all of these sources are from the same newspaper, Pennlive and are retrospective either for the 2017 Harrisburg mayoral election or for the aforementioned corruption investigation against Reed. None of them are primary sources.

And that is everything that I can find on this election on the internet after an hour or two of looking and I've given up. If anyone does have enough information to flesh out a real article about any elections, specifically the 2005 election, I hope that this information was helpful. If not just ignore this long rambling section in the talk page.

Scu ba (talk) 01:17, 11 January 2023 (UTC)