Toledo-area voters cast ballots on school levies, city council, and school board races Tuesday, but poll results were slow to roll in throughout the evening, and problems with voting equipment and the Lucas County Board of Elections website made matters worse.
The board of elections had yet to count 100 percent of votes cast in municipal elections as of 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, as poll workers and elections officials tabulated results from new voting machines.
The county's election website updated slowly throughout the evening, with the earliest results posted more than an hour after polls closed. Franklin and Cuyahoga counties, Ohio's most populous counties, wrapped up their tabulating well before Lucas County — which is known for being among the last places in the state to post election results.
The board's online election widget also failed to update with precinct totals, which elections officials blamed on a glitch by an outside vendor, making it impossible to see on the election results website what percentage of votes had been counted throughout the evening. A widget with a similar design used by Cuyahoga County did not have the same problem.
At around 11:30 p.m., officials were searching for a batch of memory cards that had been misplaced but was later recovered. They also had to retrieve paper ballots in order to count results from several precincts where machines had not been properly shut down, which extended vote counting into early Wednesday.
To retrieve the paper ballots, board of elections employees traveled 15 minutes to their warehouse where paper ballots are stored and bring them back to the Early Vote Center on Monroe Street. Board members have been pushing to house all its operations and storage in one facility.
"If we were all in one building, we could walk across the building and get the cards," said Lucas County Board of Elections Chairman David Karmol. "Another reason we need to be in one place."
Roughly 19 percent of eligible voters turned out to cast ballots in Lucas County. About 48,000 people voted in person Tuesday, with another 7,300 people casting early or absentee ballots.
Elections board Director LaVera Scott said some early morning problems with the machines were reported, but those problems were chalked up to setup issues and user errors. Technicians fixed what Ms. Scott called major problems at six polling places out of 132. All voting machines were correctly up and running by about 9:15 a.m. throughout the county.
Having multiple people have issues using the machines was unexpected, Ms. Scott said, especially since the county just had an election in September.
“We didn’t have these issues in September,” she said. “I’m just kind of flabbergasted myself.”
Those who couldn’t use the machines were given paper ballots.
“My main thing is I want people to be able to vote,” Ms. Scott said.
At the Walbridge Park Shelter House, poll workers said Tuesday afternoon that things had run smoothly the rest of the day following the machine glitch in the morning.
Voters trickled into that polling place in the afternoon.
In Wood County, elections board Director Terry Burton said the voting process ran smoothly during the day. Wood County used newer versions of the touch-screen system, and no problems were reported during the day. Elections officials as of Tuesday night said they expected more results would be forthcoming soon.
“All our locations were up and running at 6:30 a.m.,” he said.
First Published November 5, 2019, 2:25 p.m.
