Gainesville — Election day results were unavailable for release late Tuesday, but local voters, and their opinions, were out in full force.

County officials verified that the early voting phase showed 6,201 participants. Total election day voter counts were also unavailable, but official Crystal Anderson said that by 4 p.m. Tuesday, nearly 500 people had visited the North Central Texas College (NCTC) lyceum to cast their ballots.

“It’s been great,” she said. “We had a lot of early voting and so we weren’t sure how much we’d get today. It was a pretty good turnout during the primaries, but I think this was even more.”

County resident Everett Marker, who voted at the NCTC lyceum, said he was voting Republican.

“I’m a little more conservative on the fiscal end of things,” he said, and then added that he wasn’t sure how he’d rate the fiscal policymaking of current president Barack Obama. “I would have to think a little while on that one.”

Tuesday’s election was geared on the state and federal levels; local candidates ran unopposed, and the presidential election evidently drew chief focus.  Local candidates included District 68 representative-elect Drew Springer; county attorney-elect Ed Zielinski; and county sheriff-elect Terry Gilbert.

Gilbert, a Republican, said his own vote for presidential candidate Mitt Romney represented his hope for a change from Obama’s tenure.

“I think the country needs to go in a different direction and I think he will be the man to do it,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “As with any good president, we need to have a smaller federal government and a bigger state government, and I think he will be the man to help get us there.”

The sheriff-elect added that he felt Tuesday’s turnout was a show of strength for the local Republican party.

“I think we’ll actually set some records for turnout, and it will be toward changing,” he said. “I think the enthusiasm is in the Republican party to get Obama out and put somebody else in there.”

Local Democratic Party proponent Pat Ledbetter, also an NCTC professor, cited her own support for Obama.

“I’m very hopeful that America will finally wake up and realize that we need the leadership of someone who cares about working-class people, and is not just totally subservient to the upper 1 percent,” she said.

But despite her party allegiance, Ledbetter admitted she has developed rancor with America’s current campaign system on all sides, calling it a “media-driven” vehicle that pits candidates against one another in a perpetual sound-bite contest.

“I think the whole campaign has been really polluted and perverted by the money issue and by the way campaigning is done by these 10-second TV ads that have no substance,” she said Tuesday. “And I don’t feel that we’ve really been able to engage the issues as a free democratic society. Each candidate is given two minutes to answer the most difficult questions in our public life. And they can’t be answered in two minutes and we can’t engage in any intelligent democratic debate when those are the parameters.”

As a case in point, Ledbetter cited what she saw as a change in tone throughout Romney’s presidential campaign.

“Romney was able to completely reinvent himself for the general election,” she said. “He tried so hard to go ‘extreme right’ to get the nomination, but then because of the way our politics is driven by media sound-bites, he’s able to get just enough sound-bites to make him sound halfway reasonable for the election. I think he’s been wholly appropriated by the right; appropriated by the extreme right-wing. And I don’t even think that’s where most Cooke County people are.”

But Ledbetter added that even as a Democrat, she doesn’t dwell in a zone of blind loyalty.

“I’m not a Democrat because I agree with everything the Democratic Party does,” she said. “I’m a Democrat because I want to make it a better party. I want to have an influence on what the party does.”

She cited one example of disappointment in President Obama: his “competitive funding” approach to education reform.

“I think he gives too much to the whole ‘voucher’ movement,” she said. “Education is not a competitive enterprise and never should be. It’s a collaborative enterprise. We do best as teachers when we do better, not when we compete with each other. Competition works great if you’re selling widgets, but not when you’re educating children.”

For complete election returnss go to www.gainesvilleregister.com.