CLEVELAND — The last two presidential elections in Cuyahoga County saw voter turnout right around 70%, already nearly half of that number this year has requested vote by mail ballots.
At 265,118 requests so far, the county is already 37.5 % over the number they had vote by mail just four years ago with five weeks still to go.
The party break down shows 64% of Democrats in the county have already asked for an absentee ballot, 44% of Republicans and 18.6% of non-partisans the largest voting bloc accounting for 70% of all voters.
The six places with the highest percentage of voters looking to vote by mail are all on Cuyahoga County's east side with Orange leading the way with nearly 50% of all voters requesting a ballot.
For those of you looking to head to your polling place a heads up, nearly one in 10 of you will have seen your polling places change for a number of reasons, many related to the pandemic.
"The Secretary of State told everyone in Ohio all 88 counties do not set up polling locations inside of senior residential facilities and so we did have quite a few of those in Cuyahoga County," said Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director Anthony Perlatti.
In all Perlatti said 83,557 voters in 20 municipalities have had their polling locations changed. They will be notified in the coming week with a mailing alerting them to their new neighborhood polling location.
They also want voters who plan on going to their local polling place to know they might see a line out the door. That's not a bad thing but a social distancing thing.
"In some of our locations we just did not have the space to be able to queue the voters inside the polling location," said Deputy Director Shantiel Soeder. "So some of those lines will actually start at the very entrance of the location."
And one change from last week if you're a Cuyahoga County voter who wants to get a jump on the election process the sample ballots for all 975 precincts have been approved and can now be found on the Board of Elections' website.
