DID MONTGOMERY PRIMARY REVEAL A SHIFT IN PARTIES?
More Democrats turned out for mail-in election; leaders to work with state to improve system.
More people voted Democratic Party ballots in Montgomery County’s primary election this year than there are registered Democrats in the county, according to Jan Kelly, director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections.
“Party affiliations changed,” Kelly said, adding that those who switched would have been Republicans or unaffiliated with a party.
Montgomery County has 29,750 registered Democrats, but she said 39,215 people cast Democratic
Party ballots in the April 28 primary election.
That made Democratic Party ballots cast nearly 132% of registered Democrats. She said Republican Party ballots were cast by 28,604 voters, or 79.7% of the 35,872 registered Republicans, Kelly said.
Ohio voters declare their party affiliation by the partisan ballot they choose in a primary election. Those who do not want to declare an affiliation pick a non-partisan ballot so they can vote on tax issues and other non-partisan matters. This year 1,924 non-partisan ballots were cast, which is 0.65 percent of the 294,520 registered voters in the county who have no party affiliation.
The total number of people who voted in the county in this year’s primary was 69,743 and voter turnout was 19.37 percent of the county’s 360,142 registered voters, Kelly said.
By comparison voter turnout for the presidential primary of 2016 was 41.8%. In 2012, the primary turnout was 21.2% and in 2008 it was 48.6%, she said.However, in 2016 and 2008, both parties had competitive primaries in Ohio.
This year’s presidential primary had multiple Democrats on the ballot. When Ohio’s primary was originally scheduled for March 17, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was still in the race. By the time the rescheduled election was held on April 28, former Vice President Joe Biden was the only Democrat with an active campaign. President Donald Trump was the only presidential candidate on the Republican ballot in Ohio.
The board of elections on Monday certified the results of the election, which was held by mail after the state canceled the March 17 in-person voting due to coronavirus. All boards must complete certification of results by May 19.
“What an election. It was just an unbelievable task that we were asked to do, but we did it,” Kelly said before the vote. “The legislature asked a lot of boards of election without thinking it through.”
Before voting to certify results, the board reviewed absentee and provisional ballots that the paper ballot scanner rejected due to markings made in pencil, damage to the ballot or other issues. Once they approved the valid ballots board staff remade those ballots to match the original ballot, with both a Republican and Democrat involved in the process. They then ran the ballots through the scanner.
Ohio’s primary election was done by mail except for a limited number of people who could vote in person at the board offices on Election Day. Those allowed to vote in person included people who had requested but not received ballots, homeless people and some disabled people.In-person votes cast before the original March 17 election date were also couinted.
Kelly and Deputy Director Steve Harsman praised the the U.S. Postal Service as an avalanche of ballots came through the mail. At one point on the Saturday before the election the board had people ready to process ballots but only a few arrived, said Kelly.
She called the post office official in charge of this area and learned that a worker who was normally working was off. The official intervened and thousands arrived that day to be processed, Kelly said.
Harsman and Kelly are putting together a list and working with state and county elections officials to come up with proposals to make voteby-mail go more smoothly.
Board member Kay Wick also said the state needs to reconsider a long-standing law that limits the board in determining voter intent on ballots that are rejected by the ballot counting machine. The law says the board can only remake a ballot that the voter has improperly marked if the voter is uniform in the mistake throughout. One example of a ballot that could be counted would be a person who circled the bubbles on the ballot in every race, rather than filling them, Kelly said.
One ballot the board discussed Monday involved the person’s vote in one race where the voter had whited out their vote for one candidate and marked another. In previous year’s the board would consider whether the voter’s intent was clear and likely count that vote. But it was not counted because the law doesn’t allow the board to consider voter intent in an individual race, according to board attorneys.
Last fall, after getting questions about the board’s long-standing practice of considering voter intent on individual votes on a ballot, the board got a legal opinion that state law prohibited such race-by-race consideration of voter intent when there were problems with how ballots were marked, Kelly said.
People who had requested a ballot but not gotten it in time were allowed to vote in person at the Board of Elections. Harsman said 103 voters who had not requested ballots but showed up to vote on a provisional ballot were told that if they voted their votes would not be counted.
Normally provisional ballots can be cast in person on Election Day by registered voters for a variety of reasons, including because they have moved and had not changed their address or because of questions about eligibility that must be resolved after the election. But LaRose advised boards that the legislation moving the election to April 28 prohibited in-person voting by provisional voters who had not requested absentee ballots.