Today a Special Meeting of the Geauga County Board of Elections was held to do a number of tasks including ruling on indeterminate postmarked mail-in ballots, ruling on insufficient absentee envelopes, and consideration of all provisional ballots. This is necessary to complete the election and finalize all of the races.
Once the provisional and questionable absentee ballots are counted, it turns out that two of our local races are within the margin for an automatic recount:
Bainbridge Trustee: Bates (1,613)/Domonkos (1,604)
KLS Board of Education: Berganski (2,040)/Smith (2,060) - technically the lowest 4 all will be reviewed
No other races across the county require an automatic recount.
The hand recount will be conducted by 5 bipartisan teams on November 17th.
The Board then certified the election by unanimous agreement. Letters will be going on by certified mail to all of the candidates requiring recounts.
Other Topics Discussed
An internal audit was conducted on Saturday and all of the election materials were found and re-organized.
Pollworker payroll was approved to a total of approximately $61k.
A post-election audit will be conducted (per state law) over the next month prior to a December 1st meeting of the Board. In this audit, a random 5% of votes (at least 1,107) are hand counted and verified against the scanner count. The Kenston Local Schools, Geauga County JFS, and Bainbridge Township Trustee races will be used for the audit.
Results from Election Night
The results from Election Night for the Bainbridge/Auburn relevant races are here.
Update from 11/11/25 1:25pm
The election report with the latest numbers has been posted on the BOE website.
In addition to the vote totals for the candidates in the recounts posted above there are a few other interesting items:
County wide turnout: 33.09%
County wide there were 121 ballots counted after election day (0.55% of total votes)
Voter turnout in Auburn Township ended at 36.57% and Bainbridge Township at 31.95%
The BOE also posts a neat breakdown of how voters cast their ballots.
Election Day | In Office Absentee | Mail In Absentee | 4 Day Absentee | Provisional | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Votes | 17,801 | 2,333 | 1,871 | 43 | 78 |
% of Votes | 80.45% | 10.54% | 8.46% | 0.19% | 0.35% |