Thousands of Cuyahoga County voters protested the 2016 presidential election by voting.
Ballots were found to be missing votes for the presidential race. It’s being seen as a protest among many voters, proving they didn’t like their options.
It’s called an under-vote. This year there was a record high 6,500 of them in Cuyahoga County. An additional 37,000 blank ballots were submitted as well.
“It’s definitely one of the highest under-vote rates in a presidential election that I’ve seen,” said Pat McDonald, the Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
Election Day lines may have been long, but thousands of Cuyahoga County voters weren’t voting for Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton.
“These were under-votes not due to a lack of knowledge; I think it was a protest vote,” said McDonald.
At least 6,500 voters left their ballots blank for this year’s presidential race. That’s the most in county history.
So many people were frustrated with their choices; they had their voices heard by not voting for a president at all.
Not to mention the whopping 6 percent of Cuyahoga County voters submitted a blank ballot.
“If they either leave one of the two pages, that would be called a blank ballot and we had over 37,000 blank ballots in this presidential election,” said McDonald.
So what is a blank ballot?
Think of each voter as having two separate ballots. Each page of a ballot acts as its own individual ballot.
Let’s say a voter is only interested in voting in the presidential race and the Senate race, both are on page one. No races on page two interested them, so they left it blank.
When that voter goes to submit their ballot, ballot one, or their first page will be registered, but ballot two will be considered blank.
To give you an idea of how big the under-vote was for the presidential race, in 2012, about 30,000 more people voted than this year, but there were half, around 3,000, the number of under-votes.
