Leist Elected to Open Commissioner's Seat - Hopewell Heritage Headlines

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By Bret Bevens

Republican Neil Leist was overwhelmingly elected to the open commissioner’s seat in Pike County Tuesday night, defeating Democratic challenger Bob Thompson.

Leist will fill the seat currently held by Jerry Miller, who decided not to seek reelection. Leist spent many years as an educator and administrator in the Eastern Local School District.

Leist collected 5,708 votes, good for 67.3 percent of the vote. Thompson received 2,773 votes, which equals 32.7 percent.

Leist won by 240 votes in the absentee vote and collected more than 600 more votes than Thompson in the early in-person voting. However, Leist’s biggest pickup in the election was with Election Day voters, where Leist won 3,231 votes to 1,149 votes.

Leist touted his work ethic and ability to think outside the box as qualities he could use as a commissioner in an interview given before the primary election in May.

In other election news, the Waverly City School District had a levy on the ballot that caused some confusion for voters. According to Facebook posts by the district as well as the Pike County Board of Elections, the ballot language did not appear the same as the language passed by the school board or the Ohio Department of Taxation.

On the ballot, the levy was described as a one-half percent tax on earned income of district residents. However, the language passed by the school board and approved by the Ohio Department of Taxation was for a one-half percent tax on all income of the residents of the district.

In either event, the levy failed by more than 1,500 votes. It is unclear which amount the residents of the district would have been taxed had the measure passed.

In statewide elections, the rest of Ohio broke with Pike County. In the governor’s race, Democrats Dr. Amy Acton and David Pepper won the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s races despite being defeated in Pike County by Republican candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert McColley by a count of 2,591 votes, an almost two-to-one margin. Dr. Acton is the first woman ever elected governor of Ohio.

In the race for the United States Senate, in Pike County, Sen. Jon Husted defeated Sherrod Brown by a two-to-one majority, despite Brown picking up enough votes in the rest of the state to win the race and return to the United States Senate in 2027.

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