CLEVELAND — With more than 3,000 polling locations across the state, there will always be issues on Election Day, and Tuesday was no exception.
In Stark County, the high volume of voters led to some polling locations running out of smart cards and paper ballots. In Summit County, it was problems with a few of the new ballot scanners used for the first time in a county-wide election. Voters who had already cast their ballots on paper but could not scan them had this basic question:
"How do we know that our vote's going to be counted," shouted one man in line with his filled-out ballot. They were assured their unscanned ballots would be placed in an orange auxiliary bag, overseen by Republican and Democratic poll workers who would scan the ballots when the problem was fixed. Still, voters like Mike Ruby of Cuyahoga Falls weren't feeling it.
"They're trying to assure us that the orange box is secure, and they would do all that," said Ruby. "Personally, I don't trust that. I would much rather come in and place my vote and have it scanned properly."
A short time later, the problem was resolved, and the votes were scanned by, again, the bi-partisan team of poll workers.
"I like to look at those stories and say those are actually success stories, not failures," said Aaron Ockerman, who heads the bipartisan Ohio Association of Election Officials. "Because we did have backup plans in place, and we executed those plans."
Ockerman said the election as a whole went smoothly given everything election officials were up against between staging this election last minute while at the same time going over the signatures on the petitions needed to put the abortion and marijuana questions on the November ballot.
"It's hard for people to understand and fathom what it looks like to have a million signatures dumped into your lap for those two statewide petitions and then have to check those right in the throws of conducting this very large statewide election," Ockerman said.
According to Ockerman, he's seen a rise in voter concerns about how elections are run not just since the 2020 election but dating back to the presidential election of 2000 featuring George Bush vs. Al Gore. He said those concerns about ensuring all votes are correctly counted are not an obstacle but an opportunity.
"Before that, elections were just kind of a sleepy little thing that people did and didn't really give much thought to until that obviously historic election and all the scrutiny that came down around that election," he said. "So since then, it's been an opportunity for us to educate the public and our voters about how elections are run and how they're administered and why they should be confident in the results, so yes, it's definitely been more challenging, but that's also an opportunity for us to kind of illuminate the public as to what goes on behind the scenes at the boards of election so we view that positively."
