The Republican members of the Summit County Board of Elections are proposing sweeping cuts they say are needed to live within the reduced budget it anticipates from the county this year.
Changes include significantly reducing the number of precincts, not offering an outside location for in-person, absentee voting in the Nov. 6 presidential election, and eliminating the district poll worker positions, which are part-timers who receive benefits and have been held up by some as an example of the board’s excessive spending.
“I don’t know any way around this unless Russ [Pry] gives us more money,” Alex Arshinkoff, one of the board’s two GOP members said Tuesday during a 3›-hour meeting, referring to the Summit County executive.
Arshinkoff said he wanted to warn the board’s Democratic members he will bring the changes up for votes at the board’s next meeting, in two weeks.
The board’s Democratic members questioned whether the changes the Republicans are suggesting should be made during a presidential election year and how much money they would save. They said the focus right now needs to be on making sure the board stays within the $1.5 million the county allocated for the first three months of this year, especially looking at how part-time employees are being used.
“None of these issues would save money in the first quarter,” said Tim Gorbach, the board’s Democratic chairman.
Pry sparked an outcry from the board last year when he recommended a $4.7 million elections budget for 2012. All county agencies and officeholders were asked to reduce spending to deal with falling revenue.
The board countered with a request of $9.3 million, which included $1.1 million in contingency costs, saying it needed more money because of additional expenses in a presidential election year. The board spent $7.1 million in 2008, the last presidential election year.
County Council eventually approved a three-month temporary budget of $1.5 million.
The Pry administration and the board have been doing separate analyses of the board’s spending, comparing Summit to Lucas and Montgomery counties, which have about the same population and number of voters but spend millions of dollars less than Summit each year. The county is still doing its study.
GOP study
The suggestions the Republican board members are making are based on the board’s analysis. Highlights of that study include:
• Even with the county’s lower proposed budget, Summit County’s budget for this year is significantly more than either Lucas or Montgomery, which are both at about $3 million.
• Lucas (354) and Montgomery (360) have more than 100 fewer precincts than Summit’s current 475. Both counties reduced precincts since 2009. Montgomery purchased electronic poll books in 2011 that are said to speed up the process at the polls.
• Summit County has 36 full-time employees, compared to 24 in Lucas and 27 in Montgomery. Summit also has 12 district poll worker coordinators, who work part time but get full-time benefits and are jobs the other two counties don’t have. Montgomery, however, has 76 polling location supervisors who are paid $800 a year without benefits.
• Summit County’s budget for booth workers and part-time employees is substantially higher than either Lucas or Montgomery counties. The biggest gap is between Summit, which will spend nearly $400,000 on part-timers, and Lucas at about $43,000.
Summit’s Republican board members are proposing reducing precincts from 475 to 269, a 43 percent decrease. This would give the county an average of 1,300 voters per precinct, up from the current 736. Board members estimate this would save about $123,700 — mostly from having fewer booth workers — in the November election.
The Republicans think not having an outside center for absentee voting would shave another $50,000 in personnel and rent, while eliminating the district poll workers would result in an additional $188,000 in savings. The reductions together would cut costs by about $362,000.
With these cuts, the Republican board members said, they still aren’t sure the board can function within the budget the county is offering.
Points of contention
Gorbach said he isn’t opposed to studying whether the board should reduce its precincts, but thinks such a change would be too disruptive in a presidential election year. He called the suggestion that Summit could go without an outside early voting spot “outrageous.” The board opened an outside spot in November 2008 and November 2010 after having long lines, waits and parking issues during the 2008 primary when early voting was only offered at the board’s Grant Street office.
“We can’t do it,” Gorbach said.
Board members dedicated much of their lengthy meeting Tuesday to looking at the use of part-timers, including for campaign finance audits, absentee ballot processing and voter registration. The Democratic members in particular questioned the amount of time being spent auditing voter registrations by checking registration cards with the information in the board’s computer.
“It sounds like an awful lot of work, manpower and effort going through those cards,” Gorbach said.
He asked the board’s director and deputy director to talk to the Secretary of State’s Office about whether other counties audit voter registration cards and how they go about it.
In other business, the board deadlocked on dropping an investigation into whether Akron City Council violated election laws with an advertisement that ran in the Beacon Journal before the November election that suggested how to vote on a statewide ballot issue and two local tax issues. Democrats, who think the investigation might be out of the board’s purview, wanted to abandon the investigation that they previously had agreed to, while Republicans favored pursuing it.
The board also split on sending a public records request to Akron, seeking information related to council’s ad, and beginning to clip signatures for the board’s records from poll books. Secretary of State Jon Husted will have to decide these tie votes.
Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at 330-996-3705 or swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com.
