Politics & Government

Romney Runs Away With Melrose, Mass. Victories

The former governor handily won the Super Tuesday primary in Melrose and statewide.

Mitt Romney matched his decisive primary victory in Massachusetts here in Melrose, where he coasted to a .

Romney won 76.3 percent of the votes in Melrose, with Rick Santorum winning 10.2 percent, Ron Paul 7.9 percent and Newt Gingrich 3.6 percent.

Statewide, the former Massachusetts governor won 72 percent of the vote according to the Boston Globe. None of his Republican rivals met the 15 percent minimum threshold to win at least some of the state's delegates to the Republican National Convention, meaning Romney gets a clean sweep of the Bay State's delegates.

Find out what's happening in Melrosewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Each candidate is battling to amass the 1,144 delegates needed to secure the party's nomination and Super Tuesday had 419 delegates up for grabs. Romney started the day with 203 delegates; Santorum had 92; Gingrich, 33; and Paul 25.

Romney also won primaries in Idaho, Vermont and Virginia, and was locked in a battle for key state Ohio with Santorum as Tuesday night turned over over into Wednesday morning. Santorum won North Dakota, Oklahoma and Tennessee on Tuesday, while Gingrich won his home state of Georgia.

Find out what's happening in Melrosewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

President Barack Obama ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. In Melrose, 768 voters still cast ballots for him, 86.6 percent of the Democratic ballots cast.

With only 11 registered Green-Rainbow Party members in Melrose, five ballots were cast in its presidential primary—two for Jill Stein, one for Kent Meslpay and two for "no preference."

A slow start at the Melrose polls rebounded in the late afternoon and early evening. In early afternoon, Election Administrator Linda-Lee Angiolillo said that the city was trending towards an 8-10 percent turnout, notably low for a presidential primary and matching the 9.5 percent turnout the city had for its last biennial election in November, which featured only one contested race for Ward 7 Alderman.

Unofficial results show a total of 2,921 ballots were cast in the presidential primary. Based on the 18,720 registered voters in the city, that would put turnout at around 15.6 percent—slightly better than how the , although still a low turnout.

That figure is slightly higher than Secretary of State Bill Galvin's projected turnout, according to the Boston Globe, of about 500,000 total voters in Massachusetts, a turnout of less than 15 percent.

The last presidential primary in 2008 had a relatively good turnout in Melrose of 55 percent, but that race featured two hotly contested races for both the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.


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