Ohio early vote way up compared to 2022 but absentee ballot requests are down

Last week, Ohioans began casting ballots in this November’s midterm election. Voters will choose a brand-new slate of state-level leaders from governor to treasurer, a U.S. Senator, and representatives for Congress and the Ohio General Assembly.

With three weeks until election day, there’s still a lot of voting to come. So far, data from the Ohio Secretary of State indicate early in-person voting is up — by a lot — while absentee voting has slipped compared to the last midterm election in 2022. Taken together, early voting in the current cycle is running behind that election.

Voters have been moving away from mail-in voting for several cycles, but growing suspicion of the process among Republicans can hardly have helped.

Despite voting by mail himself, President Donald Trump has spent years attacking it. In just one of many examples, last year he asserted without evidence that “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”

In Ohio, state lawmakers have eliminated the grace period for late-arriving absentee ballots and proposed — but not yet enacted — onerous new requirements like including a photocopy of your ID when voting absentee.

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League of Women Voters of Ohio Executive Director Jen Miller said, “Absentee voting is secure and the most accessible method for many Ohio seniors, people with disabilities, military families, college students, and those who live far from their county Early Vote Center.”

“Absentee ballots are stored in rooms that require both Republican and Democratic keys to open,” she added. “Bipartisan teams of election workers work in concert to verify a voter’s identity before a ballot is mailed out and again when it is returned; otherwise, it won’t be counted.”

In the last few weeks, President Trump has changed his tune about absentee voting — a rhetorical reversal he’s made before.

The figures

In 2022, after a week of early voting, Ohioans had cast 50,368 ballots in person and requested 871,041 absentee ballots.

This year, 194,841 Ohioans have cast a ballot in person during the first week of early voting, or nearly four times as many as the previous cycle.

Statewide, counties have so far tallied about a third of the early in-person vote they saw in the entire 2022 election.

Franklin County, the strongest early vote performer that year, lags that statewide average slightly, but several other large counties are outperforming it.

Cuyahoga, Lucas, Lorain, and Summit counties — accounting for the Cleveland, Toledo, and Akron metro areas — have all already cleared 40% of their 2022 early vote totals.

At the same time, the number of absentee ballot requests has dropped by almost a quarter million.

So far, just 631,079 Ohio voters have asked for a mail ballot.

“I think it’s pretty easily explainable,” University of Akron Political Scientist David Cohen said. “The President of the United States for the last 20 months has been claiming that voting by mail is not secure.”

Trump’s last minute bid to boost absentee voting gets overshadowed by his past statements and actions, Cohen said.

He pointed to the president’s attempt to commandeer the U.S. Postal Service to impose new voting restrictions as one example.

The U.S. Supreme Court chose not to intervene in that case after a lower court barred the administration from going forward.

Cohen also brought up state lawmakers nixing Ohio’s grace period.

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“I think there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle now that don’t actually trust (voting by mail),” he said, “and would prefer to just do it in person to ensure that their votes count.”

In terms of demographics, older voters make up the biggest share of the total so far. Seniors, for instance, have accounted for more than half of the ballots cast through Monday.

Democrats and unaffiliated voters lead Republican voters to this point. Democrats have returned about 94,000 ballots, and unaffiliated voters account for a little more than 67,000. GOP voters have cast nearly 64,000.

Although a lot can happen between now and Election Day, Cohen thinks those figures offer a warning for Republicans.

“If we believe the public opinion polling that we’ve seen,” Cohen said, “about two-thirds to maybe even three-fourths of those independent voters are voting Democrat this year.”

“There’s a reason that Donald Trump keeps coming back to Ohio,” he added, “and it’s not to vacation and it’s not to play golf.”

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