No U.S. postal officials showed up for a hearing the Summit County Board of Elections held Monday about nearly 900 absentee ballots in the November election that weren’t counted because they lacked the required postmarks.
The elections board had subpoenaed both the Akron and Cleveland postmasters general to appear at the hearing or requested that another postal official attend in their stead.
“This is certainly a big issue — an important issue for the voters of Summit County,” said Tim Gorbach, the board’s director. “For them to not come here, it’s disappointing.”
During the hearing, the board did, however, hear from two Cuyahoga County Board of Elections officials about their board’s experiences with postal issues. The Cuyahoga board officials offered a potential solution involving an alternative method from traditional postmarks to verify that absentee ballots were mailed by the state deadline in future elections.
Under state law, elections boards may count absentee ballots received after the election as long as they are postmarked by the day before the election and received within 10 days of the election. Boards use a traditional postmark to gauge whether ballots received late meet this time frame.
The issue first came to light in mid-November when Summit board members voted to disqualify an abnormally high number of absentee ballots from the Nov. 3 election because they lacked postmarks. The problem prompted the board to schedule Monday’s hearing.
Though postal officials didn’t attend the hearing, they have met with Summit County elections board staff twice and had a conference call with them last week. Postal officials also met with Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.
No action planned
Gorbach said the board doesn’t plan to take any action against the postal service for failing to appear at the hearing and will instead focus on finding solutions to the postmark problem.
David Van Allen, a postal service spokesman, said in an email Monday that the agency is continuing to work with Husted to develop a solution for this problem.
“The postal service is giving its highest priority to resolving issues concerning absentee ballots in the state of Ohio,” Van Allen said.
Husted is considering requiring elections boards to use a letter-sized envelope for absentee ballots that postal officials say are run through a machine that automatically affixes postmarks. Some elections boards, including Summit County, have been using a larger envelope for absentee ballots that don’t automatically receive postmarks.
Summit board officials, though, are skeptical about whether changing the envelope size will solve the problem. They said the board averaged less than half a percent of its absentee ballots lacking postmarks until this year, when the number shot up dramatically. The main change was Akron’s mail being processed in Cleveland rather than at Akron’s main post office, part of a money-saving consolidation by the postal service.
“The whole recipe changed,” said Bryan Williams, a Summit board member.
Pat McDonald, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, said that board had nearly 1,000 late absentee ballots in the November election.
Only 81 lacked any type of mark from the post office, he said. The remainder had some other type of a postal marking that currently isn’t counted as a postmark in Ohio, such as postage affixed by a postal clerk or printed from online.
Bar code
While this metered mail doesn’t have a postmark, McDonald said the post office applies a bar code to it that can be read with a scanner to show the time and date when the mail went through the post office.
His board recently ordered such a scanner and plans to use it to record the bar codes on late absentee ballots the board received in the last election to determine when they went through the post office. If the $400 scanner works, he said the board plans to request through Husted’s office that this method be permissible as a way other than a traditional postmark to gauge when a late absentee ballot was mailed.
McDonald said his staff went to the main Cleveland post office to pick up mail twice on Election Day and collected 10,000 mailed-in absentee ballots.
Summit County board member Alex Arshinkoff suggested that local board employees may need to follow the Cuyahoga board’s lead and go directly to the main post office in Cleveland to pick up absentee ballots in upcoming elections rather than to the Akron post office assigned to the board.
McDonald said another absentee ballot issue that needs to be fixed is how Ohio law now puts the deadline for applications for mailed-in absentee ballots at noon on the Saturday before the election. With mail moving slower than it used to, he said, there is no way boards can get ballots to voters and voters can return them before the postmark deadline of the Monday before the election.
Williams agreed and called the Saturday application deadline a “systematic lie to voters.”
Nancy Treichler, a member of the board of the Tallmadge chapter of the League of Women Voters who attended the elections board meeting, said the league is hoping the postal problem will be fixed before next year’s presidential election.
“It’s got to be resolved some way so votes are counted that should be counted,” she said.
Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at 330-996-3705, swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com or on Twitter: @swarsmithabj.