If you followed Cuyahoga County election returns on Tuesday, you were in for a long night. The board of elections went into the next morning tabulating hundreds of thousands of ballots in this week’s high-turnout midterm.
Why doesn’t the board count faster?
In an interview, Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director Anthony Perlatti pointed to a few reasons:
- Because of the high turnout, workers finished breaking down voting locations later than is typical after the polls closed.
- It took time to upload vote data from ballot scanners because the ballots themselves were so long.
- The board had to process and count 3,200 vote-by-mail ballots that came in on Election Day.
“No matter how long it takes, that does mean that something is wrong,” Perlatti said. “People should have confidence when we post our results that they’re correct, and that’s the key takeaway.”
He received the final OK from the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office to close up shop and go home somewhere around 5:55 a.m. Wednesday, he said.
Perlatti said that Tuesday’s election went well, although a few polling locations saw longer lines. Voters cast 111,429 ballots by mail, 54,045 in person and 316,537 on Election Day. That doesn’t include the more than 10,000 provisional ballots that the board will check and count in the coming weeks.
Ballots and gear started arriving at BOE warehouse at 9:30 p.m.
At the county’s 269 polling places, voters fed their ballots into scanners. Those scanners recorded voting results data and ballot images onto memory sticks.
The sticks and scanners aren’t connected to the internet. They must be physically taken back to the tabulation center in the board’s Cleveland warehouse to be added to the election results.
After the polls closed at 7:30 p.m. and the last voters in line cast their ballots, workers packed up polling places. They brought ballots, memory sticks and other equipment to drop-off locations. From there, vans took the gear back to the board’s Cleveland warehouse.
The county saw “super high Election Day turnout,” which was “awesome,” Perlatti said. But the turnout also meant that it took longer for workers to close down polling locations and head downtown, he said. The first van didn’t arrive at the warehouse until 9:30 p.m., he said.
“That means that you’re not uploading that stick until 9:45,” Perlatti said — more than two hours after the polls closed.
Board had more than 1.5 million ballot images to upload
The vote-counting process, known as tabulation, is another bottleneck.
Each memory stick holds more than just the data on which bubble voters filled it. The sticks also contain images of each side of every ballot page. There were hundreds of thousands of 3- to 4-page double-sided ballots. That translated to more than 1.5 million ballot images, Perlatti said.
All that data needed to be uploaded to the tabulation server at the board’s warehouse. The tabulation room has five stations for uploading memory sticks. Together, those stations could process around 100 memory sticks every 30 minutes, he said.
“If you have 1,000 of those, that’s just four-and-a-half hours of raw putting sticks in,” Perlatti said. “And if you’re not doing that until 9:30, 9:45, you do that math, that takes you past midnight.”
Every half hour or so, workers use a different set of single-use memory sticks to transfer vote totals from the tabulation server to the Ohio Secretary of State’s system.
Perlatti suggested one way the board could speed up the count: upload only the voting data, waiting until the next day to deal with ballot image files. While it also might be possible to add uploading stations, doing so might strain the server’s capacity, he said.
Thousands of absentee ballots came in on Election Day
In Ohio, election boards can process vote-by-mail and early-in-person ballots before Election Day. The results from those ballots are typically the first numbers posted after the polls close.
On Election Day, the board picked up another 3,200 absentee ballots from the U.S. Postal Service and the drop box, Perlatti said. Those needed to be opened, authenticated, scanned and counted that night.
Workers turned to those final absentees after they finished uploading memory sticks sometime around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, he said.
The board is working with its election equipment vendor to be able to “double up,” scanning final vote-by-mail ballots at the same time workers are uploading data from memory sticks, he said.
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No word from Justice Department observers
The U.S. Department of Justice sent monitors to Cuyahoga County to watch the voting process this week. It has happened before under both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations.
Perlatti said he spoke with Justice Department representatives before the election but didn’t hear from them afterward.
“They had my phone number, their contact to get in touch with me if they saw something,” he said. “I got zero phone calls, and I didn’t get any reports of Civil Rights Division of DOJ monitors being involved with anything.”
Monitors from a congressional election observer program also visited Cuyahoga County, he said. Perlatti said they didn’t report anything back to him, either.
