New dashboard tracks voting, trends in Ohio

(The Center Square) – Less than 10% of the absentee ballots requested in Ohio have been returned less than three weeks from the Nov. 5 general election.

The figures come from a new dashboard created by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. The dashboard, populated by each county board of elections, allows anyone to see return rates by county, early voter numbers, voter demographics and party affiliation.

“Elections are under a microscope like never before, and transparency is essential to the accountability of our elections,” LaRose said. “We led the passage of landmark legislation that enables us to more effectively retain and report election data, and this resource is the first of several we’ll be launching in the coming months to make good on that commitment. We’re working with our county boards of elections to build a data reporting infrastructure that will allow us to provide daily trends related to voting behavior. We’ll ultimately add new dashboards showing voter registration trends and election history.”

Through Wednesday, Ohio voters requested a little more than 1 million absentee ballots by mail and returned 104,214. Also, early in-person voting started in the state Oct. 8, and 329,448 votes have been cast.

Total absentee requests and early voters is just shy of 1.4 million, with 600,000 of those coming from voters 65 years old and older and more than 230,000 of those have been cast.

Republican voters have requested 343,652 early or absentee ballots and 159,610 have been cast. Democrats have requested 265,616 and cast 106,617.

The overwhelming majority of requested ballots, 764,093, have come from unaffiliated voters, but only 165,613 have been cast or returned.

Seventy-six percent of all the current ballots requested have come from early, in-person voting.

“It’s really important to emphasize that this is still a beta project, and it’s very much a work in progress,” LaRose said. “It’ll take some time to work out the reporting requirements with each county so we can ensure that every input is consistent, but we want to put this out there and let people kick the tires a bit. We’ll find anomalies and discrepancies that need to be worked out. That’s part of crowdsourcing. We’re just taking data that’s always been there at the county level and putting it out to the world in a centralized platform. I’m excited about what we’ve done and where this is going."