If you requested an absentee ballot by mail but haven’t gotten it yet, you aren’t alone.
Local elections officials say they’re catching up now from the flood of absentee applications they received from both before and after early voting officially started on Oct. 2. This was also the earliest date when they could mail out early ballots to those who had requested them.
Many boards had an additional delay in being able to respond to mail-in requests for early ballots because of a wording change made to Issue 2, a statewide ballot issue, which meant that ballots had to be updated by the two approved vendors in Ohio before they could be sent to voters.
The Portage County board, for example, wasn’t able to mail out absentee ballots until Oct. 9. The board has now mailed 9,000 ballots for the 12,000 requests it has received and expects to be up-to-date by the end of this week, said Brad Cromes, the board’s deputy director.
The board then expects to be able to respond to mail-in requests on the same day it receives them going forward, Cromes said. The Portage board has tried to give voters estimated arrival dates when they call the office to ask when they’ll receive ballots.
The Summit County board caught up with its mail-in requests Saturday and now expects to be able to respond to mail-in requests in the same day they are received, said Joe Masich, the board’s director.