For those planning to spend Election Night refreshing Cuyahoga County results, we have good news and bad news. 

Here’s the good news. On the whole, vote-counting should move faster than it did in November 2023. That’s because of a key change the board has made in its tabulation process – when staff go through multitudes of memory sticks compiling unofficial results and uploading totals to the BOE’s website. 

Last year, nail-biters like Cleveland’s Issue 38 hung in the balance all night as tabulation dragged on. The hangup had to do with the board’s new counting system. The software had to process both the vote tallies and image files of millions of ballot pages. 

It took twice as long as usual to post results, according to BOE Director Anthony Perlatti – about 2.5 minutes for each of the hundreds of ballot scanner memory sticks. 

This time is different. Tonight, in general, board staff will upload the vote data only. They’ll deal with the scanned ballot images another time. Each memory stick will take just 10 seconds to process, rather than 2.5 minutes. 

“That will speed things up tremendously,” Perlatti said at a news conference Monday. 

Now for the bad news. In Ohio House District 20, two Democrats are running as write-ins: incumbent state Rep. Terrence Upchurch and Nathaniel Cory Hartfield. 

That means the board will need to upload ballot images for that district on Election Night. In other words, tabulate the slower way. The district includes the near West Side of Cleveland, downtown, part of Slavic Village and the northern half of the East Side.

Perlatti offered one more caveat. Cuyahoga County is one of Ohio’s biggest, with a lot of votes that take time to tabulate. 

“We still won’t probably finish doing what we need to do until probably around 1 o’clock in the morning, going through our checks and balances, our due diligence, to make sure everything is accounted for,” he said. “But that will be much better than 3, 4, 5 o’clock in the morning.”