Instead of automatically tossing out more than 1,000 absentee ballots in March, innovation and a last-minute directive from state officials allowed Cleveland poll workers to count dozens of votes.
After a spike last fall in absentee ballots lacking postmarks, state and county election officials began exploring ways to reduce the number of mail-in ballots that arrive after the election without proof that they were mailed out on time. Ballots that arrive within 10 days of an election may be counted if mailed before the election.
The issue, locally, was big. Nearly 900 late ballots in Summit County lacked the sufficient postmark to determine the time of mailing. All were discounted, automatically.
Cuyahoga County, which also saw a surge in troublesome ballots, took the lead in researching an alternative solution. On the envelopes that carried the discounted ballots, election officials found no postmark but discovered a fluorescent orange bar code used internally by the U.S. Post Office to sort, date and apply postage. With the proper equipment, reading the bar code could help reduce the number of absentee ballots increasingly tossed out each year, reaching an alarmingly high number last year after cutbacks and consolidations forced the U.S. Post Office to double its guaranteed delivery time and sort local mail in Cleveland instead of Akron.
So, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections approved a $550 expenditure to acquire a machine capable of deciphering the orange bar codes. After feeding discounted absentee ballot letters from the fall through the scanner, Cuyahoga County elections director Pat McDonald shared his findings with Secretary of State Jon Husted, who consulted postal officials before loosening voting rules to accept the bar codes.
Today, every county in Ohio must use a scanner.
“Every board is required — if they have ballots that came back with an illegible or missing postmark but have a bar code — to use a scanner to try to see if they can find out when it was mailed,” Husted spokesman Josh Eck said Tuesday.
Eck said the statewide tally of absentee ballots saved by the use of scanners should be available early next week.
Counting more votes
Cuyahoga County found bar codes on 90 percent of the late absentee ballots it received in March.
Election workers there were able to include 73 of the 1,052 late absentee ballots that lacked the postmark. Most were in fact time stamped after the election deadline. Still, that’s 7 percent of later absentee ballots certified instead of tossed.
“It doesn’t seem like that’s a lot,” noted McDonald. “But 73 ballots is very important when you’re talking about the integrity of the election.”
Nearly 42,000 ballots lingered after the polls closed on the March primary election, many never cast but the rest able to sway close elections.
And in a presidential election, as opposed to a lower-turnout primary, impact could be huge. In November, for example, about 8,000 absentee ballots were discounted, about one-third coming from Cuyahoga or Summit counties. Seven percent of these discounted votes equals 550.
But absentee ballots cast this coming fall will likely be closer to the 1.7 million cast back in 2008, another presidential election year with no incumbent candidate. By comparison, less than 240,000 absentee ballots were requested, let alone cast, in the March primary.
Idle scanner
In Summit County, which had the highest percentage of absentee ballots lacking postmarks in November, the scanner solution had no impact on the March primary.
That’s because the post office, which failed to postmark nearly 900 absentee envelopes in the fall, applied postmarks to all but 16 late absentee ballots that arrived at the Summit County Board of Elections office for the March primary.
And “none of ours had the bar code,” said Joe Masich, director of the Summit County Board of Elections. “We bought one of those scanners but they didn’t have the orange fluorescent bar codes on the back.”
“I think the post office paid more attention,” Masich said. “Any issues that came up throughout the election were brought up to them.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.