Every election, in almost every Ohio county, absentee ballots show up at county boards a few days after Election Day. And in many counties, some of those otherwise valid ballots don’t wind up counting for reasons outside the voter’s control. In the 2024 presidential election, at least 1,059 of those ballots got thrown out.
Thousands more late-arriving ballots did get counted. But they wouldn’t under a bill awaiting Gov. Mike DeWine’s signature.
Under that proposal, Ohio Senate Bill 293, every one of the at least 7,793 ballots that arrived after Election Day in 2024 would have been rejected.
The measure’s supporters downplay the changes. Two-thirds of other states have a similar deadline. Late-arriving ballots make up a tiny fraction of the overall electorate. Voters will adapt to the changes.
There’s some merit to each one of those arguments, but critics contend they offer an incomplete picture.
Many states with Election Day deadlines go to great lengths to make voting more convenient. Unlike Ohio, for instance, many of them allow counties to set up multiple drop boxes.
While it’s true that a couple thousand votes don’t often swing a race, supporters’ efforts to minimize the disenfranchisement of those voters rings hollow. When it comes to other voting restrictions the same lawmakers insist a single fraudulent or damaged ballot is unacceptable.
“Just one ballot destroyed could make the difference in an election,” state Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, said in April as he presented a different bill that would prohibit drop boxes and required proof of citizenship to register.
“Imagine if trash was thrown into a drop box in a county that came down to a single vote,” he said.
Brenner’s co-sponsor, state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, regularly asks witnesses, “how many cases of voter fraud are okay?”
In an October hearing for the same measure, she referenced recent tie vote in a Wood County primary.
“And there were eight other cases that either were even or within one vote where a case of a noncitizen voting could have made the difference in those elections,” she pressed a witness. “Are you okay with that?”
Should DeWine sign S.B. 293 into law, voters may respond by sending their ballots in sooner.
In 2024, Ohio’s grace period went from 10 days to four, and fewer ballots arrived late. But voter advocates note that was the result of a lot of work and outreach.
Secretary of State Frank LaRose has committed to do “everything we can to inform voters of the change,” but lawmakers aren’t appropriating any money to help county boards to publicize the changes.
“We’re looking at a major election next year that will have high turnout and unprecedented cuts in federal funding for boards of elections,” League of Women Voters Executive Director Jen Miller said.
“If this General Assembly was really serious about election security and integrity, they would be funding boards of elections for every policy they pass,” she continued. “And once again, they didn’t do that.”
How we parsed the data
After each election, the Secretary of State compiles a report on absentee ballots.
The Ohio Capital Journal requested the information used in that report from all 88 counties.
Additionally, many counties use an absentee ballot reporting tool, which details voter-by-voter the date a ballot was requested, returned, and whether it was counted.
Between those two sources, the Ohio Capital Journal was able to collect data from 87 of 88 counties. Hancock County is the only one not represented in this research.
There are two kinds of absentee ballots — domestic civilian ballots and those for uniformed and overseas citizens. Ohio Senate Bill 293 retains a four-day grace period for military and overseas voters, so those ballots were not included.
The initial scope of the request included the last five federal elections, but the further back you go, the shaggier the data get.
The 88 county boards operate independently, and there’s significant variability in how they document ballots in the absentee reporting tool.
Was that ballot marked “uncountable,” for instance, because it was late or because the voter didn’t fill it out properly?
Similarly, the reports prepared for the Secretary in 2016 and 2018 lump all “late” ballots into the same category — whether they were postmarked on time, late, or not at all.
The report in 2020 distinguishes them but doesn’t include the number of late-arriving ballots that ended up counting.
In 2022, those reports changed again and began including more information about post-Election Day ballots.
Starting in 2024, the absentee ballot reporting tool includes a new column with specific categories for a ballot’s treatment which are used consistently across counties.
This analysis has focused on these two most recent federal elections because those data are more granular than those in previous elections.
When a voter sends in an absentee ballot, there’s a lot that can go wrong.
They might not fill out the envelope properly or not include the envelope at all. They might not sign their ballot, or their signature might not match. None of those deficiencies are included in this research.
There are also multiple ways a ballot can arrive late, all of which revolve around the postmark.
The central questions for this story are how many ballots arrived late, and how many got turned away at no fault of the voter?
So, ballots postmarked on time but arriving after the grace period are included, as are those that were never postmarked by the post office at all.
Ballots postmarked on Election Day or after wouldn’t be counted regardless of Ohio’s grace period and so weren’t included in this research. But it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider them.
Starting in 2024, the U.S. Postal Service began a Regional Transportation Optimization initiative.
In short, to cut costs and improve efficiency, at post offices more than 50 miles from a regional processing facility, outgoing mail no longer gets collected in the afternoon. Instead, it gets picked up the next morning when incoming mail arrives.
Unless a sender takes their ballot to the post office counter and asks for a postmark, that typically happens at the processing facility.
Earlier this year, the postal service even filed a rule in the Federal Register noting a postmark “does not inherently or necessarily align” with the date the post office received a piece of mail.
It’s not clear how many (or if any) Ohio ballots postmarked on Election Day or after got their postmark late because they were waiting at a local post office.
But if you were to include them, the number of late-arriving ballots in the 2024 election jumps to at least 9,461.
The share that didn’t get counted more than doubles — rising to at least 2,727.
What we found
In the 2024 election, roughly 7,800 ballots arrived at county boards after Election Day.
A little more than 1,000 of those did not count because they arrived too late. Only two counties, Fayette and Pike, received no ballots after Election Day.
Twenty-eight counties didn’t wind up rejecting otherwise eligible ballots because they lacked a postmark or were too late.
Those figures are based on data produced by county boards of elections and, in many cases, submitted to the Secretary of State.
However, Ohio Capital Journal’s count is a bit higher than the one Sec. LaRose shared with state lawmakers.
In a November hearing, he said the exact number of domestic absentee ballots arriving after Election Day was 7,579.
The Ohio Capital Journal reached out to LaRose’s office about how he arrived at that figure but got no response.
Although some races do get decided by a handful of votes, it’s rare for a thousand ballots spread across the state to swing a contest.
Still, there’s nothing to indicate those voters did anything wrong when they submitted their ballot: They either got their ballot in by the deadline laid out in state law or the postal service didn’t postmark their ballot.
During that November hearing, LaRose defended imposing an Election Day deadline.
“Human behavior is not static, it’s dynamic,” he said. “When people know that they have to have their ballot in by Election Day, they are going to respond to that.”
In 2022, mail ballots arriving up to ten days after Election Day still got counted.
In that election, 10,208 ballots arrived after election day, and of those, 1,279 were too late to be counted.
In the 2024 election, Ohio’s grace period shrunk to four days, and the number of late-arriving ballots declined as well.
That shift from 2022 to 2024 lends some credence to LaRose’s argument. But at the same time, Jen Miller from Ohio’s League of Women Voters noted presidential campaigns have a bigger door-to-door effort.
“People get their information about elections and how to participate in them by whether candidates are knocking on their doors,” she said.
Also, her organization and others spent 2024 campaigning for an anti-gerrymandering ballot issue, emphasizing the importance of getting ballots in early.
What to make of it
The potential changes didn’t really move voters contacted for this story.
Joe Holtom voted absentee in Athens County in 2016, and his ballot arrived after Election Day.
“If it’s legal and you’re registered and you do all the proper things your vote should count,” he said.
But he added, “Obviously you’ve got to look at the numbers and see if those absentee ballots would even matter.”
“I don’t think that in anything that I voted for my vote would’ve really changed anything,” Holtom said. “So, I don’t really have any strong opinions on it not counting.”
Michael Lemley voted absentee in Delaware County in 2022, and he chalked up his ballot’s late arrival to postal delays.
He wouldn’t have been happy if his vote didn’t count, but said he would’ve accepted it if an Election Day deadline had been in place.
“I would’ve been disappointed, especially because it was circumstances outside of my control,” he said. “However, I understand the need for making sure the ballots are and the voting is kept as clean as possible.”
But Bob McCollister, a member of the Lawrence County Board of Elections takes a dim view of the proposal.
While LaRose and other backers point to the small share of impacted voters as a reason to go forward with a tighter deadline, McCollister reaches the opposite conclusion.
“It’s not a huge amount of votes,” McCollister acknowledged, “So why are we trying to solve a problem that’s not a problem?”
McCollister sees it as a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy of voter suppression, and links it with partisan gerrymandering and the so-called voter purges where Ohio regularly removes inactive voters from the rolls.
The impetus for an Election Day deadline, LaRose acknowledged in October, was pressure from the Trump administration.
In a March executive order, the president simply asserted any ballot arriving after Election Day is invalid.
The U.S. Department of Justice contacted officials in Ohio warning it might sue the state if lawmakers didn’t change the law.
“These are legitimate votes that people cast. Why make it harder? What are we trying to do?” McCollister asked.
“Because a ballot is cast before Election Day and arrives a little late through the vagaries of the post office? Why should that not be counted? I don’t understand the reasoning.”
In committee hearings, Miller, from the League of Women Voters, criticized the idea of rejecting valid ballots because the mail didn’t arrive as quickly politicians want.
She noted in some regions, ballots and other mail leave the state for processing before returning to their destination.
The Ohio Capital Journal asked the U.S. Postal Service to quantify the amount mail goes out of state for processing.
In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman explained Ohio has processing centers in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland, and that most Ohio mail is processed in Cincinnati.
“In Ohio and other states across the country, mail may cross state lines for processing,” she wrote. “The Postal Service’s network is nationwide and determinations of where mail is processed are made based on efficiency and service.”
She added the postal services is “committed to the secure, timely delivery” of election mail, but did not elaborate on how much election mail crosses state lines.
If S.B. 293 gets signed into law, it will mark the third successive federal election in which the absentee ballot grace period has been shortened.
Miller contends those constant changes create confusion.
“Confusion about election logistics is the number one enemy of turnout,” she said.
“In general, we want every eligible Ohioan to vote,” Miller continued.
“Especially those folks who are on the margins that maybe they don’t participate every election, or they’re a person with a disability or a senior citizen. And every time the rules change, we make it harder for those folks to participate in the process and have their voices heard.”
What’s next
The bill was delivered to DeWine last Wednesday.
Under state law, he has 10 days, not including Sundays, to either sign it into law or veto the measure. If he does nothing it will take effect without his signature.
After he signed a sweeping photo voter ID measure into law in early 2023, the governor said he considered the election integrity issue settled.
“I do not expect to see any further statutory changes to Ohio voting procedures while I am governor,” he added.
Asked about how he’s weighing the new proposal in light of that past statement, DeWine said simply, “I’m weighing it.”
This story was originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.