Early voter turnout low in Cuyahoga County as BOE prepares for smooth primary

CLEVELAND (WJW) — Polling precincts open at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday for a primary election in which both the presumptive Republican and Democratic presidential candidates appear to have already been identified.

That may help explain a low turnout in early in-person voting in Cuyahoga County where 8,187 early in-person votes were cast from among 849,000 registered voters.

“Vote by mail is down from four years ago, early in person voting is down from four years ago,” said Tony Perlatti, Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. “Why, I don’t know. I think part of it is this being a presidential primary and both Republican and Democratic party don’t have a competitive contest.”

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To vote in the primary you will have to request either a Democrat or Republican ballot. Those who do not wish to declare a party will only be permitted to vote on issues in their local precinct.

In Cuyahoga County, there is only one county-wide issue, which is Issue 26, a renewal health and human services levy.

Perlatti says turnout for primary elections is typically low, with the highest ever being about 43% in a March election.

He belives another reason for the low turnout is that many voters don’t wish to declare a party.

“About 70% of voters in Cuyahoga county are unaffiliated and that’s not by accident,” he said. “They don’t want to affiliate with either party, they want to wait till November when both parties and candidates are on the ballot and they want to vote a split ticket.”

On Tuesday, Cuyahoga County has taken measures to improve the efficiency and the speed of the election process and the tabulation effort afterward.

Perlotti displayed new ballot books poll workers will use on Tuesday.

The ballot books are electronic tablets, which will scan photo IDs then display the voter’s address and precinct information for them to confirm.

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The new tablets are larger and easier to read than previous tablets used in Cuyahoga County.

Perlotti said steps have also been taken to make sure that each precinct will not run out of paper ballots by looking at the number of registered Democrats and Republicans in each of the county’s precincts and then doubling the number that are expected to be needed.

He also said that typically they get calls on election day claiming that the machines that read voters ballots at the polls are jamming.

Perlotti on Monday insisted that the machines do not jam.

On Tuesday, voters who request both Democratic and Republican ballots will be given two page ballots.

Perlotti said after voting, the ballot pages need to be fed into the machine one at a time, with about a five second pause between each to the machine can read and tabulate the information on the first page.

As for the speed of calculating election results, Perlotti said the county’s results last November seemed to have been slowed because all of the individual ballot results were downloaded along with a photo of the ballot itself.

Downloading thousands of photos slowed the calculation of the results.

For Tuesday’s election he said the county has worked with the manufacturer of the technology they use to allow them to download only the results that night, then later download the photos of the ballots.

He said that process will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to tabulate the results on election night, which will be unofficial.

After March 19, the county will still need to add mail-in ballots, which were postmarked no later than the 18th, but as of election day had not yet been delivered to the board of elections.

As for the integrity and security of the election process Merlotti insisted that the county has a process in which the voting machines, and those that count the ballots are not online so no one can hack into them.

The process of receiving the ballot information includes poll workers where one Democrat and one Republican each have half of a password to access the information and the memory sticks used to transfer information from the ballot machines are all brand new and never used twice.

In advance of the election, Merlotti says the machines are all tested using thousands of test ballots and the results are checked against the known contents of the ballots to make sure the counts are 100% accurate

“As we go through that the window of time from the unofficial to the official, we are re-scanning ballots and auditing everything that is going on so when we report those official results 21 days after election day, they are absolutely accurate,” said Merlotti.

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