Each election year, the Lorain County Board of Elections supervises and fulfills a number of duties to ensure that the election process is a smooth one for all parties involved. This year, however, many feel that the Board failed in this obligation, specifically concerning mailing out absentee ballots, providing updated voter registration lists and forms and providing a sufficient number of polling machines.

Law requires that the Lorain County Board of Elections send out absentee ballots 30 days prior to the election; however, Professor of Psychology Cindy Frantz said that “[the Board of Elections] definitely did not mail ballots out 30 days ahead of time.”

During the election process Frantz monitored the receipt of absentee ballots for students abroad and was also a Democratic challenger on Election Day.

Frantz spoke of many students who had difficulties voting on Election Day because they never received their absentee ballots: “These were not students who requested their ballots late. A lot of the students requested ballots in April, May and June, but [the Board of Elections] did not mail ballots until mid-October to places like Mexico. Clearly, the ballot was not going to get there on time.”

Throughout the confusion, Frantz called the Board of Elections repeatedly to ask when the ballots were mailed, but discovered later that the “date of issuance” did not mean that the ballots were mailed on that date.

Frantz believes that the ballots were “clearly not delivered to the post office on the date [the Board of Elections] gave me,” but added that everyone there was always “nice and helpful” when she called.

According to a source that preferred to remain anonymous, the Board of Elections is also required to provide updated voter registration lists to America Coming Together, a voter mobilization organization, for “Get out the vote” efforts.

Yet ACT never received these lists until election night.

This same source added that the Board of Elections “failed to make it possible to vote in a timely manner. One machine was added to 3A during the day and 3B in the late afternoon, and after the polls closed, more machines were added. But that’s too late.”

When asked how the Board decides how many machines to place at each polling location, Marilyn Jacobcik, director of Lorain County Board of Elections, said, “To be accurate, since we use punch cards, the number is specific to the precinct, not to the polling place. We allocate them using several factors. Obviously, we are limited by the number of overall units available — 1,354 in Lorain County — and then, we factor in the number of registered voters in each precinct, the historical voter turnout in the precincts and local factors; the number of issues on the ballot and whether there are splits must be accounted for.”

While this explains how the Board decides how many machines to use, this does not explain why there was a gross miscalculation of voter turnout in Oberlin this election year.

The Board of Elections could not be reached for further comment on this issue.

Megan Foster, an organizer for Ohio Public Interest Research Group, said, “OhioPIRG worked with Oberlin Votes, so we know that the County Board of Elections knew about the increase in the number of registrants but were not particularly well-prepared with the number of voting machines in place. During the day, they attempted to move more machines to the highest traffic areas, but barely. 

“Happily, most people were not deterred by the wait,” she continued. “This was a beautiful thing to see, as it’s one of the most frightening possibilities for people who are doing get out the vote work: that you get them there but they leave without voting. So mad props to Obies — town and College — but the feeling is [the Board of Elections] could have been more prepared with the foresight they had in terms of registrants.”

In addition, the Board of Elections is responsible for providing updated lists of those who have voted by 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. so that people who have not voted yet can be reminded at these times, but the Board “hampered these efforts because they just didn’t do their job,” according to the anonymous source.

This source added, “Obviously [the Board of Elections] is swamped, but somebody at some level needs to be held responsible. They’ve said in papers that they got 1,000 [voter registration] forms a day, and this may well be true, but they won’t tell you that they got 1,500 forms from Oberlin College students seven to 10days after classes started.”

This was done to get the forms in quick enough so that the Board would have time to process them, but the forms “were not processed in a timely manner,” said the source.

This led students to fill out another form so that the Board got swamped with duplicate forms, which,the source said, “made more work for themselves.”

Although many believe that the efforts made by the Board of Elections were not sufficient before, and during, election day, not all Oberlin participants see the situation negatively.

“As I think about the election and in particular the huge and wonderfully gratifying voter turnout in Oberlin, it is clear that in retrospect, Oberlin should have had more voting machines for the precincts in which student populations are most dense,” said Dean of Students Linda Gates. “The long lines inconvenienced people, I know, but on balance, I thought the very public and even prolonged exercise in the democratic process was inspiring.”