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    • Early voting in Summit County is over. How was it compared to 2020?
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    Early voting in Summit County is over. How was it compared to 2020?

    Vaseline Posted on

    Summit County had a big early voting turnout for the 2024 election — but despite all the long lines and wait times, the Board of Elections said it wasn’t a record setter.

    According to the absentee voting report on the Summit County Board of Elections website, 113,100 people voted early between Oct. 8 and Sunday. Pete Zeigler, deputy director of the board, said operations ran smoothly during the 26 days of early voting.

    Among early voters, 60,431 did so by mail, 48,455 voted at the Early Vote Center, 1,911 voted curbside and 47 picked up ballots to take with them – known as a “hand carry.”

    In the 2020 general election, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, 160,037 people cast ballots over 26 days of early voting – mostly by mail.

    Summit County election officials kept the Early Vote Center open late Sunday, the last day of early voting, to accommodate the county’s last batch of early voters.

    “Everyone who was in line for early voting at 5 o’clock last night was eligible to vote,” said Pete Zeigler, the board’s deputy director. Some voters waited two hours to cast their ballots, he said, adding: “We had people waiting here as early as 11am and we didn’t open until 1am.”

    A few people hoping to vote Monday morning were told they would have to wait until Tuesday, he said. Several others arrived during the afternoon.

    What do these numbers mean for the down-ballot candidates?

    J. Cherie Strachan, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics and professor of political science at the University of Akron, said it is difficult to know what these early voting numbers mean for non-presidential candidates because of Republicans’ changing tactics.

    Previously, she said, “we would have said that was an advantage for the Democrats” because of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to discourage people from voting early.

    Strachan said Republicans have realized that such messages put them at a disadvantage, noting that the GOP is now encouraging early voting.

    “I’m not sure I could deduce as much from it as I have in previous election cycles,” she said.

    What should voters infer from all the polls?

    The Bliss Institute recently released a poll showing Trump leading Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris in Ohio by 7%, and Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown in a dead heat to keep his seat against Republican rival Bernie Moreno.

    Support for Trump was above the 2.8% margin of error, Strachan said, “so that leads us to be relatively confident in these findings.”

    However, that does not mean that the poll is infallible.

    “There’s still a chance that if you draw a random sample, and you use that to make an estimate or generalize to the larger population, there’s still a chance that your random sample will be completely off. But the chances of it being wrong are quite high.” slim,” Strachan said.

    According to her, polls are as much art as science. She explained that the art comes from poll workers putting their knowledge of past elections to work.

    “There’s always some kind of art form that takes into account which demographics are historically very motivated to vote and then adds to that – given the context of the election and the current issues being addressed, and who is very enthusiastic or has been upset – who is that? probably going to vote in this election and figure out how we can get the weighting accurate,” Strachan said.

    “Every pollster has to use their knowledge and their understanding of past behavior in the electorate” to decide which demographics to poll, Strachan said, “and that’s why you’re going to see some variation in the polls.”

    What do the polls not take into account?

    There are two big things that polls don’t explain, Strachan said: voter enthusiasm and the strength of a candidate’s ground game.

    In the case of the dead heat between Moreno and Brown, for example, the difference will be made by the candidate’s electoral activity, which is not measured in opinion polls.

    A candidate’s ability to mobilize voters to the polls is what makes the difference in close races, Strachan said.

    “You can take a random sample, you can use past behavior to make predictions about demographic groups, but it’s very difficult with the noise of the whole election to figure out who is most motivated to come out and to vote until we actually see it,” says Strachan. said.

    Contact reporter Derek Kreider at [email protected] or 330-541-9413

    Vaseline
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