“Behind us back there, we have an absentee processing area," Summit County Board of Elections Deputy Director Pete Zeigler said while taking elected officials and community members on a tour of the board of elections' new facility.
The new location at 1050 East Tallmadge Avenue in Akron officially opened Tuesday and is complete with a larger parking lot, a new board room and more space for people to vote early. It replaces two buildings the board of elections previously occupied on Grant Street that county officials said they'd outgrown. The new building also has updated voting technology for a smoother experience, both for voters and workers, Summit County Executive Ilene Shapiro said.
"We are leading the rest of the state in this facility," she said.
One such advancement is the ability to print thousands of ballots an hour, as opposed to the technology at the old building that could print 50 ballots an hour, Zeigler said. The location also has five high speed scanners just for tabulating absentee ballots, he said.
"This facility was designed for optical scan voting in the digital, electronic and modern age," board member Bryan Williams said. "The last board of election was designed for punch card. The board of elections before that was designed for a paper ballot system."
The new location will also be easier to get to – immediately off of Ohio State Route 8, Board Chair Bill Rich said.
“This new facility will I think vastly improve the experience for voters," he said. "Access should be much better than it was on Grant Street. That’s a low bar.”
The increase in people early voting during the pandemic drove the need for a new location, Shapiro said.
"We realized when we saw people standing in the rain at the old location down there or didn't know the directions, and we had to make streets go one way," she said. "It's too confusing, and the reality of having to have a new location really struck us."
The old location had limited parking, and early voting lines often wrapped around the building with more than an hour long wait, county officials said.
"The early voting center is situated in such a way that voters who are waiting in line, which we hope will not be for very long, but those who are waiting in line will have an opportunity for at least part of the to be sheltered, because there will be a line that's inside the building," Rich said.
