Cuyahoga County BOE Certifies Official Election Results

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections certified the results of the 2020 Election Wednesday, though at least one recount is scheduled to take place next week.

A proposed 4.8 mill levy increase for Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District passed by just 135 votes, according to official certified results. But that’s a narrow enough margin to trigger an automatic recount, officials said, and the only Cuyahoga County ballot item to do so this year.

More than 1,500 voters did not weigh in on the issue – meaning they cast a ballot without marking either choice on the school levy, known as “undervoting.”

The recount will start at 9 a.m. on Nov. 24.

According to the BOE voter breakdown released Wednesday, more than 630,000 ballots were cast in total, of which about 60 percent were absentee. Vote-by-mail ballots had a return rate of about 94 percent in Cuyahoga County and just 0.35 percent of them were challenged.

The total numbers of ballots didn’t break records, said Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director Anthony Perlatti, ending up behind 2008 in some precincts. But the 2008 general election had 11 more days of early voting, he said, and more election operators to handle the ballots.

“When you break it down like that, I think that is a record,” Perlatti said. “When you take away the hours and everything, on apples to apples, they crushed it.”

The additional ballot drop site at Campus International High School, established following a lengthy legal battle, collected nearly 47,000 ballots, Perlatti said – on top of the 82,000 collected at the two boxes at the board’s headquarters.

“We’ve never seen anything like that before,” Perlatti said. “I mean, that was just huge.”

The county also received roughly 18,000 provisional ballots, of which about 87 percent were accepted and tabulated.

Standard elections usually draw between 10 and 25 curbside voters, but more than 3,200 people chose that method this cycle, Perlatti said.

The pandemic meant additional hurdles for the election, Perlatti said, and the BOE had some out-of-the-ordinary post-election statistics to report this year: about 97,500 face masks were distributed, along with 200,000 alcohol wipes, 390,000 rubber finger protectors and 991 bottles of hand sanitizer.

“It’s all new. There’s no instruction manual,” Perlatti said. “We figured it out as we went along, and the staff did great.”

About 440 gallons of rubbing alcohol are still stored at the board’s warehouse. The BOE expects to need similar precautions for at least some of next year’s election process, Perlatti said.

“We have no idea if any additional money will be forthcoming, so we need to inventory everything we have, be ready to use what we have,” Perlatti said. “We were aggressive in what we purchased and we should have enough to make it through."