Cecil
The staging room for the Shelby County Board of Elections’ equipment.
Courtesy photo | Shelby County Board of Elections
SIDNEY — Personnel transition is the overriding theme this year.
“All four of our current Board members joined the team in 2023. Susan Dunson and Dan Cecil replaced Jim Thompson and Jim Kerg in March. Jim Liggett replaced Doug Pence, and Bill Wiley replaced Merrill Asher in September,” said Chairman Dan Cecil. “The members we’ve recently lost represent decades of elections experience, and we want to thank them for their service. As for staff, Drew Higgins started as the new Deputy Director in January of 2023. This represents a turnover of greater than 70% in board and staff personnel in a single year. We are incredibly thankful for the continuity that Pam Kerrigan, Trina Riethman, and countless highly experienced election volunteers are providing during this major transition period.”
Cecil’s report continues:
We debuted new electronic poll books in 2023. One of the most common questions we get about our election equipment is whether it can be hacked into via the internet. For security reasons, none of our election equipment is connected to the internet. These poll books are the devices poll workers use to find each voter in an off-line voter registration database. They help us ensure numerous things, including: 1) That the voter is authorized to vote. 2) That they haven’t already voted. 3) That they are voting at the correct location. And 4) That they get the correct ballot.
Some voters may have noticed a bottleneck in the processing of voters because of these new machines. It has since been determined that the machines were slowing down after they had been used for a while, and a new version of the software has been developed and is currently being deployed to correct that problem. We are optimistic that our voters will not experience similar problems in future elections. Aside from the machines slowing down, the new electronic poll books received rave reviews from our poll workers.
We successfully conducted two elections in three months in 2023. Between those two elections, votes were cast to fill 98 elected positions and to decide three statewide initiatives, 26 tax levies, one city charter amendment, and four local liquor options. And even as the results of the November Election were still being certified, preparations were already underway for the 2024 March Primary and November General Elections.
One of the post-election activities that many voters may not be aware of is the certification of our local election results. One of the many parts of that process is a hand audit of a statistically significant sampling of the ballots cast in that election. Several bipartisan teams come to the Board of Elections after each election and hand count the paper ballots from several randomly selected precincts. The goal is to get a 100% match between what the volunteers count and what the voting machines reported. Because hand counting hundreds of ballots is an extremely tedious process, our auditors seldom get it right on the first try. If they do get it wrong, they recount the ballots and invariably find mistakes that they made on their first attempt. Sometimes this process is repeated several times before success is achieved. Our auditors invariably come away with a much greater appreciation for the ability of those counting machines to get it right the first time!
Key election dates in 2024 include Ohio’s Presidential Primary Election to be held on March 19 and the Nov. 5 General Election. There is a treasure trove of information available on our website, to include how to become a poll worker. Please visit https://www.boe.ohio.gov/shelby/ for more information or call our office at 937-498-7207.
