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As the presidential election reached its final stretch in late summer, counties in Ohio and Pennsylvania worried that a deluge of absentee ballot requests would overwhelm their printing capacity. So dozens of them settled with Midwest Direct, a mail order company in Cleveland.
But when it came time to print and mail Ohio ballots early last week, it was Midwest Direct that was overwhelmed. Several Ohio counties that had been waiting for company-printed absentee ballots to arrive in voters' mailboxes are now scrambling to print them themselves or come up with a last-minute contingency plan less than three weeks before Election Day.
In Pennsylvania, for example, nearly 30,000 ballots sent to voters in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, went to the wrong addresses.
Counties had provided the company with lists of tens of thousands of requests weeks earlier. The company's inability to meet demand underscored the stress that mail-in voting has placed on the nation's election process as the coronavirus pandemic curtails in-person voting. Midwest Direct is the primary outside absentee ballot provider for 16 Ohio counties, although many also have their own in-house operations.
Midwest Direct is owned by two brothers, Richard Gebbie, the CEO, and James Gebbie, the president. This summer they began flying a Trump 2020 flag over Midwest Direct's headquarters on Cleveland's west side. It was an odd juxtaposition — a company that distributes absentee ballots by mail showing preference for a president who has spent months disparaging the practice of voting by mail.
“We have the freedom to vote for whoever we want and support whoever we want,” Richard Gebbie said in an interview last month. “We're holding a flag because my brother and I own the company and we support President Trump.”
Mr Gebbie said he had “no opinion” on Mr Trump's false claims that postal voting was corrupt and fraught with fraud, but stressed that the ballots his company mailed met strict security standards.
“The security in the vote-by-mail process both in the way it's processed and the way the counties handle the ballots is very secure,” he said.
The distribution of ballots is another matter. When it came time to actually mail out the forms, Gebbies' company found a number of counties angry that they didn't receive ballots as promised.
There is no evidence that Midwest Direct has done anything improper with the ballots. Election security experts said there was nothing a vendor could do to compromise the integrity of absentee ballots.
Tammy Patrick, senior counsel for elections at the public policy foundation Democracy Fund and a former Arizona election administrator, said ballots are printed without regard to which voter will receive them and that mail companies like Mr. Gebbie's company do not they have access to the party properties of specific voters.
When Midwest Direct failed to deliver promised ballots to some of its Ohio customers, Frank LaRose, Ohio's secretary of state, advised counties to start printing ballots in-house or “develop a contingency plan,” said the Jon Keeling, representative of Mr. LaRose.
“They overpromised and overpromised,” said Diane Noonan, director of the Butler County Board of Elections. “We would get different answers from different people we talked to. Was I happy with it? No I was not.”
With Midwest Direct unable to deliver ballots to Butler County, a suburb of 383,000 residents north of Cincinnati, Ms. Noonan decided Tuesday to print and mail her county's remaining ballots domestically.
Ohio is once again a battleground state after Mr. Trump carried it by eight percentage points in 2016. A poll conducted last week for The New York Times and Siena College found former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a one-point lead over Mr. Trump.
The counties with the highest volume of late absenteeism are urban and suburban counties with large populations. Summit County, which includes Akron, and Lucas County, which includes Toledo, were two of just eight Ohio counties that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Butler County, a historically Republican county, gave 61 percent of her votes for President Trump.
Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland and is Ohio's second-largest county, also has an absentee ballot contract with Midwest Direct, but has had no problem getting its ballots printed and mailed, according to Mike West, a spokesman for Electoral Council there.
However, some Cuyahoga County voters have reported delays at the polls similar to those in other counties.
Pam Ogilvie, a high school social studies teacher from Parma, Ohio, said she requested an absentee ballot in mid-September. The Cuyahoga Board of Elections website initially said her ballot would be mailed by Oct. 6, the first day Ohio ballots could go out. A later update said it would ship by October 12th. Her ballot finally arrived Friday — 10 days after it was originally supposed to be mailed.
Ohio ballots can be counted if they are postmarked from November 2, the day before the election. They can also be returned in person to a county board of elections before the polls close on Nov. 3.
Richard Gebbie declined to be interviewed this week. In a statement to customers Thursday, he said the delays occurred because counties underestimated the number of ballots they would need to print.
“It's fair to say today that no one — not the various boards of elections, not the Ohio Secretary of State, not our company — anticipated the staggering volume of mail-in ballot requests that has actually occurred,” he said. “The estimates we were given by the counties were not what ended up being the reality.”
The Trump flag is no longer flying over her headquarters this week.
In Summit County, ballots from Midwest Direct were delayed until Oct. 10, with the remainder of the initial batch of 95,000 not mailed until Oct. 12, according to Tom Bevan, a Democrat who sits on the Board of Elections.
In Lucas County, 60,000 ballots that Midwest Direct promised to mail on Oct. 6 were mailed just a week later, said Pete Gerken, county commissioner.
And in Pennsylvania, 28,879 voters in Allegheny County, home to the state's second-largest concentration of Democratic voters, were mailed incorrect ballots as part of a batch of more than 32,000 ballots mailed since Sept. 28, according to the county board. Elections.
Mr. Gebbie has made small donations in recent years to Republicans running for federal and state office. He gave to Mr. LaRose and Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio.
Online, Mr Gebbie wrote many public posts on Facebook questioning the power of the corona virus and he criticized Taylor Swift after accusing Mr. Trump of seeking to dismantle the Postal Service.
Local officials said Midwest Direct offered a variety of explanations for why the promised absentee ballots were late in being delivered, from mechanical breakdowns to a higher than expected volume of ballot requests. Mr. Gerken, the Lucas County commissioner, said there was little communication from Midwest Direct about why the absentee ballots were not bound in Toledo.
“We have lost nine to 10 days in the process and those days cannot be recovered,” Mr Gerken said.
For Ohio, the delays in sending out absentee ballots come as Mr. LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, has barred counties from installing more than one drop box to drop off absentee ballots. The delay in receiving requested ballots has driven more voters to early voting locations, which are also limited to one per county.
“It's completely inadequate for a county of this size,” said Representative Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat whose district includes Toledo. “Voting should have been much simpler this year, but it's more complicated.”
Nikos Korasanitis contributed to this report.
