Megan McKenna has officially been named as the newest Summit County councilor after a close election for Seat C.
Summit County Clerk Eve Furse presented the ballot summary to the Summit County Council on Tuesday. Council members certified the results as the Board of Canvassers.
Voter turnout was just under 90%.
There were 26,482 ballots counted and 526 that were not counted Of those, 350 had a signature that didn’t match, 48 were unsigned and four were without an affidavit. Furse said those voters had an opportunity to cure, or fix, their ballots but did not do so by the Monday deadline.
Furse explained the ballot goes through three levels of review to verify the signature. If the third review finds it doesn’t match, the Clerk’s Office sends a letter to the voter telling them. It includes an affidavit that can be signed and sent back stating the voter mailed in their ballot and they want it counted.
“When it returns to us, we try to match that signature against the signatures we have on file and if we do, then we can go ahead and count that. If it’s still quite different, we reach out by phone to that voter just to confirm we’re actually talking to that voter and we’ve reached them at their address and the signature is indeed theirs,” Furse said.
Clerk’s Office staff last week also contacted voters who had not yet cured their ballots to remind them of the deadline and the opportunity to have their vote counted.
Candidates can also request a list of voters whose ballots need to be cured to encourage them to return their ballots. Furse said about 175 ballots were cured from when ballots started being counted.
Additionally, 97 uncounted ballots were postmarked or received after the deadline, 12 ballots were from a different election, seven had already voted and eight had various other issues. There were also 477 provision ballots, of which 454 were counted.
“We also had seven ballots of folks who had already voted … so there were two ballots [received]. We’ll be looking into whether those need to be reported or if there’s an alternative explanation for that. I think some people became concerned in this election when they hadn’t gotten confirmation on their BallotTrax that it hadn’t been received before Election Day. Some people chose to show up in person to cast their vote,” Furse said.
The Summit County Attorney’s Office in October filed criminal charges against four double voters.
There were 340 votes separating McKenna, a Democrat, from Republican Ari Ioannides. There was just about a 1% margin between McKenna, who earned 50.69% of the vote, and Ioannides, who received 49.31%.
Incumbent Roger Armstrong won his reelection bid with 52% of the vote over East Side challenger Tory Welch. The Democrat earned 12,945 votes compared to the Republican’s 11,842.
County Council Vice Chair Tonja Hanson was also elected to her first full term on Seat B. She was challenged by Betsy Wallace in the Democratic primary, but delegates selected Hanson as their candidate in March. No one from the Republican Party ran against her.