Polls open in Portage County as Covid campaign year closes
Results could be available by 8:30 p.m., an hour after polls close
By Madison MacArthur
News Lab
Around Portage County, people have been arriving at the polls to cast their ballots, capping a dramatic election season transformed by the Covid pandemic.
Faith Lyon, director of the Portage County Board of Elections, said voting is going smoothly, with people arriving when polls opened at 6:30 a.m. to cast their votes.
She said that at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. today all polling locations published lists of people who have voted at that point. This is a state requirement, and it can be used by the parties to reach out to voters who have not yet voted.
“We’ve spent months planning, acquiring PPE and creating cleaning plans for polls,” Lyon said. “We’re doing the best we can. No one expected a pandemic during an election, let alone a presidential election.”
Lyon said results are expected to come in tonight for Portage County in two rounds. The first round will be absentee ballots around 7:45 p.m., and the second round will be around 8:30 p.m., an hour after the polls close.
Greg Johnson, the Democratic candidate for Portage County Sheriff, said he was impressed with the number of people coming out to vote. Johnson is running against Bruce Zuchowski for the sheriff’s seat.
“I hope it is a sign of things to come in the future with the number of people coming out to use their right to vote,” Johnson said.
He said this was a difficult year to campaign because so many in-person events were restricted or canceled because of Covid.
“It limited what kind of campaign events you could put on,” he said. “Normally you could have fundraisers and meet-the-candidates type of events, like at the Portage County Fair, which was canceled this year. You have to use social media more to get your message out there.”
Jerry Cirino, a Republican running for Ohio Senate, said it seemed like people have been thinking about voting for weeks, judging by the number of mail-in and absentee votes already in before Election Day, but that he still wants people to go vote today if they haven’t. Cirino is running against Betsy Rader for the 18th district senate seat.
That district includes most of Portage County, Geauga County and Lake County, and Cirino plans to spend most of Election Day in Portage County interacting with voters.
“We’ve had a good ground game, knocking on thousands of doors, tubing, a campaign tactic of inserting rolled up information flyers into mailboxes, and engaging with voters,” Cirino said.
He said there were a lot of different variables to take into account for this election, such as a rise in mail-in ballots and new voter registrations, but overall that he felt good about the election.
This article was produced through a reporting partnership with the Collaborative News Lab @ Kent State University.
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