Perhaps the last Summit County resident to cast an absentee ballot in person, Etolia Gills stood at the very end of a line that stretched some 700 feet outside a Summit County polling site as early voting in Ohio came to a close Monday.
The Akronite listened to proud voters ahead of her talk of the two hours they already had endured — and a steady stream of disgruntled voters behind her, each turned away because they missed the 2 p.m. cutoff to get in line.
“I thought, ‘oh my goodness,’ ” Gills recalled of stepping in line at 1:57 p.m.
“But it’s going pretty quickly,” she said around 4 p.m. Moments later, Summit County Board of Elections Director Joe Masich climbed onto a chair in the parking lot and yelled her name.
Gills joined nearly 90,000 voters in Summit County who avoided the potential for longer lines on Election Day by mailing or dropping off their absentee ballots.
Gills kept her vote a secret. America will have to wait until Tuesday night, as the polls close, to see if her single vote has tipped the scales in what is considered to be the tightest race for the White House.
Records may fall
On Monday, the last day of early voting, more than 5,000 ballots were recorded in Summit County.
Summit County is 603 ballots below a record 88,719 absentee votes in 2008. With mail-in ballots accepted for the next 10 days (assuming they are postmarked by Monday), that record could fall.
Secretary of State Jon Husted reported Monday night that early voting (again without the pending mail-in arrivals) is at 1,798,277, down from 1,876,984 in 2012 and up from 1,744,753 in 2008.
In a normal presidential election, high turnout — especially in urban counties like Summit — is good news for Democrats who have been pushing, and literally driving, minority and young voters to the polls.
But this is no normal year.
Democrats this primary admittedly pulled Republican ballots to support or stop Donald Trump — resulting in a noticeable uptick in registered Republicans. In Summit County, between 2008 and 2016, registered Republicans grew by 8,191, a 64 percent increase, while registered Democrats fell by 15,904, a 37 percent dip.
The same is happening across Ohio. Early turnout has reached record levels in the counties surrounding Cincinnati and Columbus. Yet in Cleveland, a liberal stronghold that Democrats need to offset rural and suburban conservatives, turnout has taken a nosedive.
And despite Hillary Clinton’s weekend appearances there with Jay Z and Beyonce and LeBron James, it’s registered Republicans and not Democrats who are turning out more voters in Cuyahoga County.
Pat McDonald, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, announced Monday afternoon that early voting is down 15 percent, compared to 2012. This includes a 34 percent dip in vote-by-mail requests made by Democrats and a 4 percent uptick in those made by Republicans.
No room for error
The race in Ohio is tight.
Donald Trump holds a 3.5 percentage point lead in a Real Clear Politics averaging of the latest polling. But three weekly polls released by Axiom Strategies and Remington Research Group show his lead has shrunk to a percentage point.
This means every vote could count.
On Monday, Summit County Board of Elections officers examined more than 1,000 early ballots that have been flagged for errors. The meticulous, bipartisan attention given to each ballot discredits any claim that the process of voting, at least the official process, is rigged.
As is the case with most everything at county boards of elections, equal doses of Democrats and Republicans are present.
Board employees Debbie Walsh, a Republican, and Christopher Anderson, a Democrat, wheeled in two tables lined with bins full of problematic ballots, each already remade so that the four members of the Board of Elections — two Republican and two Democratic — could compare the original and the remake.
The board members, who often butt heads when interpreting state law and election rules, diligently poured over the ballots, setting aside their partisan squabbling to serve objectively.
The errors that brought the more than 1,000 absentee ballots before the board included “double bubbles,” coloring outside the oval, ripped edges and folds, squiggly lines, an X instead of shaded circle and picking one party’s candidate for president and the other for vice president (what one worker jokingly called the “Dream Team” phenomena).
After Democratic board member Bill Rich slid ballot No. 6201 to his Republican counterpart, Alex Arshinkoff, it was the Republican who discovered an error that would favor his opponent.
“I think I found a mistake,” said Arshinkoff, who pointed out that the original ballot showed a vote for Democrat Sandra Kurt and not Republican Ann Marie O’Brien in the race for county clerk of courts.
Rich smiled at his Republican adversary.
“My board [of election] membership comes first,” said Arshinkoff, a longtime card-carrying member and officer in the Republican Party.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .