The only early voting location in the county is at the board of election’s office at 1802 Princeton Road, Suite 600 in Hamilton. Unzicker said hosting the increase of early voters, so far, has been smooth.
“Early voting is going really well,” Unzicker said. “We have been busy, but [we’ve] not [had] a line, so that’s been helpful. We’re getting them through and processed pretty quickly.”
This week marks the fourth week of early voting, and the Butler County BOE is preparing for the regular surge of last-minute early voters.
“Once we are getting toward that last weekend, we usually see an increase in traffic for in person early voting,” Unzicker said.
In 2018, early votes went from 9,200 to roughly 17,000 in the final week before election day. Board of Elections Deputy Director Eric Corbin expects to eclipse that mark this year.
“Definitely, as we get closer, we get busier,” Corbin said. “It’s so hard to predict, but we think we could get to 20,000 [early voters].”
Unzicker said, as usual, early voting will be available today through Friday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
But, she added that the Butler County Board of Elections is also offering weekend voting hours (8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday; 1 to 5:00 p.m. Sunday) as the election nears, while also offering hours on the eve of election day (8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday).
Unzicker, who’s tasked with managing both in-person early voting and absentee ballots, said that there hasn’t been a similar increase for votes by mail, at least not yet.
“At about this time in 2018, we were around 24,300 [absentee ballots],” Unzicker said. “We’re at about 23,800, so it’s pretty comparable to 2018, we haven’t seen an increase in that.”
Comparatively, Unzicker said total registered voters in the county have only barely ticked upward in the last four years; there were 254,748 registered in 2018 and the board estimated there are 255,400 registered now — a 0.26% increase.
ELECTIONS 2022
Get complete coverage of the election, including information on the races and issues, at journal-news.com/elections.
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