Lucas County officials unsure if absentee ballots have been mailed
Nearly 70,000 Lucas County residents hope to vote by mail in the November election, but county elections officials on Monday were unsure if absentee ballots had actually been mailed to any of them because the vendor contracted to print and send them has stopped responding to requests for an update.
On Tuesday, the first day absentee ballots could legally be sent out, the Board of Elections reported that they had sent 62,259 processed ballot applications to Midwest Direct, a Cleveland company that prints, stuffs, and mails ballots to voters in 20 Ohio counties. Since then, Lucas County has sent an additional 4,483 applications.
Elections board Director LaVera Scott said Monday that the board has processed all of the applications they have received so far, but has been unable to get a confirmation from Midwest Direct as to how many ballots have been actually mailed out.
Absentee ballots slow to arrive in Lucas County
Once the Board of Elections processes and audits absentee ballot applications, they send a PDF file with mailing information to Midwest Direct. The company then prints the ballots and mails them. But now it appears that the vendor is labeling ballots as mailed in an online tracking system, even though those ballots have only been uploaded into the Midwest Direct system, Ms. Scott said.
“We want to make sure we’re on the same page,” she said. “Processed is one thing. Inserted in the mail is a whole other thing. Putting it actually in the mail is the final step.”
Midwest Direct CEO Richard Gebbie told the Akron Beacon Journal on Thursday that the first round of printing wouldn’t be ready for the U.S. Postal Service to pick up and deliver until Monday evening.
In addition to a high volume of requests, Mr. Gebbie said that there have been mechanical issues with some of the printing machines, the Journal reported.
Midwest Direct did not respond to The Blade’s request for comment.
The Board of Elections has previously mailed out absentee ballots themselves, but with the onset of the pandemic, they anticipated a greater influx of absentee ballot applications and decided to outsource. Ms. Scott said that, even with 20 people, her office would only have been able to process approximately, 3,500 ballots per day. Midwest Direct was contracted to speed up that process.
Ms. Scott said that the county has yet to pay Midwest Direct for their services. Payment will be made at the project’s completion, she said, though she did not offer how much the services would cost.
A ballot box on a counter prepared for early voting at the Warren County Board of Elections, in Lebanon, Ohio. Ohio and Republican groups including the Trump campaign are defending a GOP election chief's directive limiting ballot drop boxes in the critical presidential battleground to one per county.
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