THE ELECTION County shows more voters than eligible are registered

Columbiana County won't have a list of voters until next week.
By DAVID SKOLNICK
VINDICATOR POLITICS WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- More than 100 percent of those in Mahoning County eligible to cast ballots in the Nov. 2 general election are registered to vote.
About 104 percent of those who are 18 and older are registered to vote, which is impossible.
The 2003 U.S. Census says the county had 186,928 people who are at least 18. The county's board of elections lists 195,092 people eligible to vote, or 8,164 more adults than actually lived in the county in 2003, the most recent updated census count.
Some of those additional voters could be those who turned 18 in the past year. The 2003 Census listed 16,566 people between the ages of 15 and 19 in Mahoning. But because the category isn't broken down by each age, there isn't a way to find out how many were 17 in 2003 and are now 18.
The main reason the county's voter registration figure is more than 100 percent is the way it is permitted to take people off its voter rolls, said Michael Sciortino, election board director. People cannot be removed from voter rolls in Ohio unless they fail to vote in two presidential elections, die, or move out of the county and election boards find out, he said. The last election purge in 2001 removed about 5,000 people from Mahoning rolls.
"The other explanation is people move, and we don't hear from them," Sciortino said.
What census shows
The U.S. Census shows Mahoning County lost about 10,000 people at least 18 years of age in 2003, compared with 2000.
Mahoning isn't the only county in Ohio with voter registration figures greater than the number of adults, said James Lee, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office. Lee said there are counties in the state with dead people registered, and the U.S. Census numbers may be outdated or incorrect.
Cuyahoga County's registration percentage is 100.7, the percentage is 108 percent in Mercer County in western Ohio, and it's 100.3 percent in both Putnam County, in northwestern Ohio, and Gallia County in southern Ohio, Lee said.
The registration percentage in Ohio is more than 80 percent, Lee said. The percentage in Trumbull County is about 85 percent.
Monday was the deadline for each of the state's 88 county election boards to have voter registration lists prepared with names, addresses and political party affiliations -- if voters have one -- at their offices, Lee said.
While Mahoning and Trumbull election boards have that information available, the elections board in Columbiana County doesn't. And it won't until probably next Monday, said John Payne, the county's elections board director.
The reason
"There is no way in the world we can get it done" by Monday, he said. "We're getting envelopes from other counties with people who registered in the wrong county that we have to process."
Lee said the secretary of state's office won't ask for a finalized list from the election boards until sometime next week. The office realizes that the increase in voter registration makes it difficult for smaller county election boards to complete the information, he said.
Columbiana's elections board already missed one deadline. The board didn't have absentee ballots available to voters at its office by the Sept. 29 deadline. The ballots were available Oct. 5.
Payne said he had no idea how many registered voters there are in Columbiana County. But the Columbiana County elections board told the secretary of state Sunday that it had 77,586 registered voters and is still counting, Lee said.
In Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania's deadline for counties to submit registered voter numbers to the Department of State is Monday, but the department is somewhat flexible on that date, said Brian McDonald, its spokesman. Mercer County didn't have a figure as of Monday.
In the five county boards in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys, absentee voting is up compared with the 2000 presidential election. The deadline to accept absentee ballots in Ohio is Oct. 30 and Oct. 26 in Pennsylvania.
Mahoning County had 12,319 absentee ballots cast in 2000. It already received about 14,000, and is getting 200 to 300 a day, Sciortino said.
Trumbull County had about 10,000 absentee ballots cast in 2000, and has 9,700 as of Monday with 100 to 200 arriving every day, said Norma Williams, its election board director. Payne expects about 3,500 absentee ballots this year, compared with about 3,200 in the 2000 election.
In Pennsylvania, Lawrence County expects at least 2,500 absentee ballots this year, compared with 1,956 in 2000. In Mercer County, more than 3,000 absentee ballots are expected to be cast compared with 2,400 in 2000.
skolnick@vindy.com