Jan Kelly, director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections, said an off-year election never gets the kind of early-voting fervor leading up to a presidential election, but absentee numbers this year also seem to be off those from 2009 and 2011, years when high-interest statewide issues were on the ballot.
Through Sunday, 13,164 absentee ballots had been requested or cast in Montgomery County, compared with 16,448 absentee ballots in 2009 when voters approved casinos, and 19,269 in 2011 during the Senate Bill 5 rollback election, according to Mike Dawson, an Ohio elections expert. SB 5 sought to limit public employee’s collective bargaining rights.
Dawson said Issue 13, the Sinclair Community College levy, could give a boost to Montgomery County’s turnout.
Kelly is projecting a 41 percent turnout for Montgomery County. In Greene County, Llyn McCoy, the elections director, predicts 35-40 percent of registered voters will cast ballots. Without the statewide issues, McCoy said the election would be expected to draw 30 percent of registered voters.
Greene County processed 5,837 absentee ballots as of Monday compared to 7,676 during the 2011 election, McCoy said.
As of Oct. 23, the most recent date statewide numbers are available, 328,385 absentee ballot applications were requested and 148,550 absentee ballots cast — 54,634 of those in person and 93,916 by mail. According to the Ohio Secretary of State, 179,835 absentee ballots were still outstanding as of that day.
Statewide, 332,543 voters cast absentee ballots in 2013, a year in which no statewide issues appeared on the ballot. In 2011, during the fight over Senate Bill 5, 680,656 voted early.
It won’t be known until after the votes are counted tonight, but some early voting patterns suggest Issue 3, the pro-marijuana measure, may not be pulling in droves of young voters, Dawson said.
He analyzed early voting data through last week which included the ages of absentee voters in Franklin and Hamilton counties. What he found may not bode well for Issue 3. The average age for a Franklin County resident requesting an absentee ballot is 61.5, he said. Hamilton County’s was a tad younger: 54.3.
“So by and large there doesn’t look like they’re turning out younger voters,” Dawson said.
Montgomery County’s Kelly said a push by Sinclair got some of the community college’s students to the polls early, but she agreed most of the early voters here were older.
“I would say the early voters — demographically — do seem to be a little older. We don’t have a lot of young kids,” Kelly said.
Dan Tokaji, a professor of constitutional law at Ohio State University, said ResponsibleOhio, the backer of Issue 3, is banking almost exclusively on the turnout of young people to pass the marijuana issue.
“I suppose what I would be looking for more than anything else is whether we are seeing a higher turnout from voters in university areas,” he said. “Those are the ones most likely to turn out on the yes side.”
Another analysis by Dawson suggests students — or at least those living within the precincts including Ohio State University — either won’t vote, aren’t on board, or are waiting to vote today. Just 752 out of more than 41,000 registered Franklin County voters in the precincts surrounding the university had requested absentee ballots as of Sunday, said Dawson, creator of OhioElectionResults.com.
What might get more voters to the polls today is one of those intangibles that always improves turnout, said Beverly Kendall, Miami County Board of Elections director.
“We’re going to have a beautiful day tomorrow,” she said. “I hope people get out and vote.”
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