CINCINNATI — Potential record-breaking voter turnout is expected in Hamilton County.
Just 22 days away from an Election Day when voters will decide local, statewide and congressional offices, the Hamilton County Board of Elections said this year's November midterm election is trending on par or even better than the November 2018 election.
As of Oct. 17, 2022, the Hamilton County Board of Elections counts 64,402 vote-by-mail requests, 3,617 people voting early in person and 596,816 registered voters in the county. One of those registered voters, 19-year-old Kameron Boggs of Cincinnati, voted for the first time on Monday.
"I'm feeling accomplished, I feel like I'm taking that next step in life you know growing up a little bit more," Boggs said. "I just thought it was important, I just thought, you know, voting, you can make a change with your vote."
Sherry Poland, Hamilton County's director of the elections, said early in-person voting and mail-in absentee ballots are trending higher in 2022 than at this time four years ago.
"They're interested in the election, they're interested in the offices that appear on the ballot and the candidate," Poland said.
Voters can utilize the county's 24-hour drop box to drop off their mail-in absentee ballots. Election workers will go through the box multiple times a day, and two keys are needed to open the box. Two workers from different political parties also have to be present to go through the votes. The drop box is also monitored by surveillance video 24 hours a day.
In an e-mail to a new Ohio resident, the Board of Elections said they "currently have a backlog of voter registrations to process. We also have not received all of the on-time registrations from all of the BMVs in Hamilton County."
"What we see in those final days leading up to the close of registration, this election it was Oct. 11, is that we will receive another number of registrations from all of those various sources, so we will get a lot of those in the last few days, it will take us a few days to get caught up," Poland said.
Poland stressed the county is caught up with new voter registrations but said the county is still waiting on some registrations from some libraries and BMVs and didn't say how many. While the county processes early votes, the Hamilton County Board of Election is asking for more help. It's looking to hire 300 more people to work the polls on Election Day.
"We'd like to hit a goal of about 2500 we need a minimum of 2200, the reason we want to try and obtain 2500 is we want to have a surplus of poll workers that are trained that can go out and fill out any holes that we might have for last minute cancellations," said Poland.
Check your Ohio voter registration here.
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