MOUNT VERNON — Presidential elections typically generate a higher voter turnout, and the 2024 General Election promises to follow that pattern.
“We’ve been told not to expect to leave [on Election Day] until 3 or 4 in the morning,” Knox County Board of Elections Director James Blazer said.
As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, 5,413 voters requested absentee ballots.
Knox County Board of Elections (BOE) staff mailed 4,876 ballots on Tuesday, the first day of early voting, and another 384 were sent on Wednesday.
In the past, election workers typically only mail out around 350 ballots.
“The crunch is now,” Blazer said. “Our numbers are way up on new registrations. We had about 4,200 voters who fixed their registration. That is a large number as well.”
Fixing their registration involves correcting a bad address or updating a driver’s license.
Most voters return absentee ballots through the mail or drop them in the collection box at the Board of Elections, 104 E. Sugar Street. A Republican and Democrat empty the box several times a day.
BOE staff includes only five full-time employees. Seasonal staff account for another 33, plus poll workers. A fully-staffed team is 235.
The BOE ramped up hiring to prepare for the 2024 General Election turnout.
“Two hundred and fifty was my goal. We’re sitting now with 278 people confirmed and trained, and we even have a wait list,” Blazer said. “That’s kind of a unique thing. We’ve not hit that 235-number before.”
About 15 to 20 people will be on-call the day of the election if someone calls in sick, according to Lisa Sabo, education and outreach coordinator.
Political parity safeguards your vote
The Board of Elections is perhaps the only organization where your employer requires you to state your political affiliation. Many functions require a Republican and a Democrat to perform them together.
“We maintain that parity, even with our part-time staff in order for us to do certain things. There are doors that it takes a Republican and a Democrat to open to get into those rooms,” Blazer said.
Workers are evenly divided between both parties.
“When the polls open, the poll manager in this county is going be a Republican because the majority of the voters are Republican. But all the other staff are Republicans and Democrats, and we make sure that that’s an equal number,” Blazer said.
Additionally, a Republican and Democrat work together to test the ballots and machines.
“There’s lots of redundancy in this, lots of security,” Blazer said.
Preparing for the 2024 General Election
To prepare for an election, BOE staff create ballots, proof them, and test them in the voting machines. Testing includes verifying the different markings for each jurisdiction.
Staff members test about 750 ballots.
“When we run the 750 ballots, we’ll see that pattern repeated for each contest in the election so we know the system is reading the ballots and how they’re marked and identified correctly,” Deputy BOE Director Jack Goodman explained.
“Each one is slightly different, depending on the issues and candidates there, and it’s coded slightly differently. So, on Election Day, if you’re voting in Mount Vernon, you can’t cast a Fredericktown ballot.
“The machine knows which ones they will accept and which they won’t.”
Machines at the Board of Elections read every ballot for early voting because voters come from jurisdictions throughout the county.
In addition to testing the ballots and equipment, Blazer and his staff met with first responders, local and elected officials, and EMA, among others, to prepare for contingencies.
“We had meetings with Homeland Security about all kinds of things normal people wouldn’t even think about,” he said. “If we lose electricity, we could continue running the election.
“The goal is to never go down, never to stop the voting. That’s just not acceptable.”
Election Day
When you arrive to vote, you will scan your ID into the poll book. The poll book either verifies that you can vote, or it alerts the poll worker there is a problem.
“It’s at that point where they’ll decide whether or not a provisional ballot needs to be cast,” Blazer said.
If everything is correct, voters select how they want to vote. Options are a paper ballot filling out bubbles, or the Express voting machine with a touch screen.
The Express machine also serves as the BOE’s ADA-compliant machine.
“It is simply a marking device. It’s not a tabulator,” Goodman said. ”You can review your selections, print out a ballot, and then cast it into the DS 200 machine.”
If a machine goes down on Election Day, voters cast their ballot into an emergency bin. If the machine is easily fixed, a Republican and Democrat poll worker will remove the ballots from the emergency bin and scan them into the machine.
“In the worse case scenario, they can be brought back to the [Board of Elections] and scanned. So there are all these contingency plans in place,” Goodman said.
In Ohio, each county chooses which vendor and supplier it will use. Blazer said that, essentially, Ohio has “88 different recipes to vote.”
“That by itself helps alleviate some of the concerns about hacking and things like that,” he said.
Inside the voting machine is a register tape that tabulates the vote. Before voting starts on Election Day, poll workers print a “zero tape.” They check that the count is zero and sign the tape for confirmation.
They also run a 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. printout. After the polls close, poll workers print out a new tape.
“That would be the actual tabulated results,” Goodman said. “They sign that and bring a copy back to us, and they tape a copy to the window of the polling location.
“So in addition to the drive which resides in the machine, we have the tapes that we can check and verify.”
A Republican and Democrat bring the drives and blue bins to the Board of Elections. A Republican and Democrat BOE board member take the drive to the ballot room, and the tabulation begins.
The state requires BOE staff to report the number of provisional ballots and outstanding absentee mail ballots before they can go home.
Provisional ballots
Blazer believes voters misunderstand provisional ballots.
“Provisional ballots are put in place so that everyone gets an opportunity to vote. If something’s incorrect or maybe askew in the information we have in the voter registration system, we want them to go ahead and vote,” he said.
BOE staff set aside provisional ballots and work to rectify the issue. A misspelled name or incorrect address are common reasons people are asked to vote provisionally.
“It’s important that everyone understands that provisional voting is that extra step to allow people to vote who may not have been able to vote if you just went with what was there at the polling location,” Blazer said.
Provisional voters receive information about how to contact the BOE, its hours of operation, and what information is needed.
“They also get a hotline number they can call to see if their ballot was counted and if not, why it was not,” outreach coordinator Sabo said.
Voters have four days to provide the necessary information for their ballot to count. The BOE starts reviewing provisional ballots the Wednesday following the election.
Goodman said provisional ballots have an 85% success rate. In 2020, 850 voters cast provisional ballots.
“We hope with the work we’ve done with our voter registration database and some cleanup on that that we’ll have less than that. But in a large election, we could have 600 to 900,” Goodman said.
The BOE must certify the 2024 General Election results by Nov. 20.
