Trumbull tallies its votes till 10 a.m.

By Ed Runyan

WARREN — It was a long night for elections workers in Trumbull County, who had predicted that counting a record number of paper ballots would lead to delays.

Kelly Pallante, Trumbull elections board director, was working on her 30th consecutive hour without sleep at 10 a.m. Wednesday when her office released its complete election results.

That’s about 10 hours later than the office usually works and probably more than eight hours after elections workers in Mahoning and Columbiana counties left for the night, said Ron Massullo, a regional liaison for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

The Trumbull elections board released 78 percent of its vote totals by 10 p.m., making it possible for voters to know the outcome of most races by bedtime.

The next 12 hours were spent counting the 26,000 paper ballots received from those who voted early or filled out a paper ballot at the polls, Pallante said.

“There wasn’t anything wrong. It just took time,” Pallante said of the paper ballots, which are fed through an optical scanner which kicks out any ballots that contain questionable votes, such as erasures.

With more than twice the number of paper ballots to scan than ever before and using scanners that work much slower than equipment used in Mahoning County, it was inevitable that the process would go past midnight, Pallante said.

Massullo said Trumbull’s scanners are “way slower” than Mahoning County’s.

Pallante and Jodi Fiorenzo Dibble, deputy director of Trumbull County Board of Elections, predicted several weeks ago that the office would still be counting paper ballots as late as 4 or 5 a.m. As a result, workers were given permission to work through the night and close the office at noon Wednesday.

Massullo said Trumbull County was not alone in having to work through the night. He added that the Trumbull elections board fulfilled its requirement to turn in its unofficial results to the secretary of state’s office by noon Wednesday.

Craig Bonar, Republican Party chairman and a member of the board of elections, said he doesn’t know whether the lateness of the results indicates a need to change the way the office operates.

Much of the office’s operation is dictated by directives from the secretary of state’s office, he said.

Pallante said buying more and faster scanners would speed up tabulations, but right now it’s hard to know whether to invest in them or not. The board could buy them for the next election and learn from the secretary of state that they are no longer needed, she said.

Pallante expected voter turnout of about 80 percent of the county’s 149,261 registered voters but actually got voter turnout of about 71 percent, or 105,558, she said.

Jeff Ortega, a Brunner spokesman, said he doesn’t know how common it was for elections boards across the state to work until 10 a.m. to complete its tally, but four counties — Stark, Montgomery, Butler and Franklin — were still compiling results at 2 p.m. Wednesday.

runyan@vindy.com