Voting Absentee When You Didn’t – An Anecdote From My Friend

I’ve known Julius for over two decades. We worked together at the same company and on the same projects together. We’ve stayed in touch, albeit at times, infrequently. But he’s always generally asking me, the political propeller head, political questions.

This time, however, he was doing the talking – about voting:

Skip – Warren County, OH lets you download who voted!  names and addresses. So I did that.  Sure enough – I voted.

Absentee.

However, my son & I voted in-person the week before.

my daughter voted absentee (military);   I get that.

At least the ballots counted are LESS THAN the number of registered voters 🙂

The ratio below seems plausible, based on I voted early and had to wait 45 min, and my wife voted in-person on 11/3, and had no waiting at all.

I sent a list of questions to the Warren County Board of Elections – will see if I get an answer.

Note that Julius didn’t vote twice – he went to the poll and did it in person. I can vouch for Julius – he’s about as straight an arrow as I am in trying to do the right thing. It’s obvious that he didn’t do the absentee mail in voting route.  I need to go back and ask him more questions about that. But he did get an answer from the Warren County Board of Elections:

Good morning-
Thanks for your questions concerning the most recent General Election. The answers are as follows:

a. what was the split between in-person voting, and mail-in ballots. The answer to that can be found on the attachment that I have included and is listed per race by the initials:

AB- Absentee by mail voting
ED- Election Day
EV- Early Voting- in person voting for the 30 days preceding the election
PR-Valid provisional ballots

b. how were the mail-in ballots processed
Our voter registration system generates a ballot that is specifically assigned to each voter and the identifying stub number is how we verify that you are sending back the ballot we sent you. Once we receive your ballot back to our office we verify the information (address, one form of identification) and signature on your sealed identification envelope and put your ballot in the double locked vault (you need a member of each party with their own key to not only open the door to the room with the vault but to also open the vault). Once the state allows us to begin the process of opening the absentee ballots, a bi-partisan team uses a report of all ballots received that day to open each envelope, verify the stub number is correct and remove the stub from the ballot inside. The stub stays with the envelope and the ballot goes into a box with all the other ballots received that day. This box is kept in our double locked vault until a bi-partisan team begins scanning the ballots into the our Central Count scanner but don’t tabulate the results until 7:30pm on Election Night.

c. what machine was used to process the ballots
Our tabulation equipment, both in the polls and here is in our office is by a company called ClearBallot. (https://clearballot.com/) Our in-office Central Count scanner used for Absentee ballots takes a digital image of both sides of each ballot and we can view how the ballot was counted by the software. If the tabulation software has any question about a vote it asks us, as a Board to verify the vote and how it should be counted. These reports are always adjudicated by a member of both parties and certified by our Board members. In the polls we use a ClearCast scanner in each precinct that also takes a digital image and ensures the vote is clear before accepting the ballot. If there are any questions the ballot will be rejected, the scanner makes a loud beep and the voter is asked to confirm the choice that the scanner thinks might be in error (overvotes or blank ballots are always rejected until the voter verifies that was their intent).

d. how long are the actual ballots kept, after the election
According to the Ohio Revised Code 3505.31, ballots are kept for 22 months for a federal election unless there is a pending court action or court order.

e) if in-person voting requires a driver’s license, how do you validate mail-in ballots? are ballots cross-referenced against the OH DMV or the OH tax returns?

I mentioned the process for verifying the ballots that come by mail in the question above. The information that we use to check ballots is already in our voter registration system which is part of the statewide voter registration database. This database is stringently verified through the state’s connection to both the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the social security database. Any discrepancies and duplications are handled daily by the individual boards of elections and we communicate across the state to ensure that our voter records are up to date and accurate.

Please let me know if this prompts further questions that I can answer concerning this.

Thanks,
Shari

Shari Huff
Deputy Director
Warren County Board of Elections
520 Justice Dr. Lebanon, OH 45036

Well, I was impressed. Julius is not overly political in nature and the fact that he went the extra mile AND he got answers back was a plus. Those answers seem to be ok but unlike Julius, they would invoke more questions back because how the car looks from the outside doesn’t tell me what’s under the hood or how the rest of the mechanicals are looking.

I will ask about the early vs absentee voting. That said, a new from another battleground State…