For the second straight presidential election year, a vendor hired to print and mail absentee ballots to Mahoning Valley voters failed to do its job.

This time it was ElectionIQ LLC, an Akron company, hired by the Mahoning County Board of Elections to print and mail ballots that got fired after failing to complete the job in a timely manner.

It means that some ballots requested by voters last month won’t arrive in their mailboxes until today. They should have been there about two weeks ago. That will result in some unable to vote because they are out of town with others – including me – having to go to the board’s lone drop box to hand-deliver them.

At a time when election fixing conspiracies are high, this didn’t help.

Board Director Tom McCabe said he sent the company a file with about 22,000 requests from voters for mail ballots. The company was supposed to start mailing them Oct. 8, the first day of early voting.

But by Oct. 15, a mere 800 ballots were mailed by ElectionIQ. The next day, McCabe, who is also county Republican Party chairman, drove a board of elections truck to the company’s headquarters and picked up 11,000 ballots that were printed. McCabe brought them to the downtown Youngstown post office, which is working with the elections board to expedite the mailing of the absentee ballots.

But that left 10,000-plus ballots still not printed and mailed by ElectionIQ as of Oct. 17.

Saying he “couldn’t trust them anymore,” McCabe fired ElectionIQ. After searching for a new vendor, McCabe got Graphic Village of Blue Ash, near Cincinnati, to agree to print the county’s mail ballots as well as the Election Day ballots. The latter job was also supposed to be handled by ElectionIQ.

The remaining mail ballots were picked up Monday by McCabe and hand-delivered again to the downtown Youngstown post office.

If the ballots were mailed from southwest Ohio rather than picked up by McCabe the delay in receiving them would have been even longer.

ElectionIQ also had trouble with ballots in Erie, Pa., sending almost 300 people the wrong ballot along with the correct one and a delay in printing and mailing.

I spoke with a number of Mahoning County voters waiting for their ballots, and they were very upset by the delay.

McCabe called it “a worst-case scenario that happened,” and apologized.

After the delay in printing the ballots, the post office got them out quickly and has vowed to do its best to have them sent back to election boards as soon as possible.

But the delay is causing other issues.

The Ohio secretary of state’s office permits only a single s box per county placed at boards of elections. A new rule from the secretary of state requires those dropping off ballots for relatives to go inside the board to sign an attestation. The board has limited hours so you can’t legally drop off your spouse’s ballot when the office is closed.

Also, the state Legislature passed a law in 2023 that requires ballots to arrive by mail no later than four days after the election to be counted. Before that, the deadline was 10 days after the election.

The ballots still have to be postmarked by Nov. 4, the day before the election. Any ballot postmarked after that isn’t counted.

There’s a chance that those waiting until right before the election to mail ballots won’t have their vote counted.

The Trumbull County Board of Elections decided this year to have its 18,000 requests for mail ballots handled in-house with about 15,000 of them mailed Oct. 8, the first day of early voting, said Director Stephanie Penrose.

It’s quite likely that ElectionIQ accepted too many county boards of elections for printing and got overwhelmed.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

During the 2020 presidential election, both Mahoning and Trumbull voters requesting mail ballots experienced delays.

The two were among 16 counties in Ohio that contracted with Midwest Direct of Cleveland to handle its mail ballot printing.

At the time, Richard T. Gebbie, its CEO, said the delays were caused because “in many cases, we processed three times the volumes of requests the county board of elections anticipated.”

Mahoning was among nine counties to go in-house when Midwest Direct couldn’t do the printing on a timely basis. Mahoning ended its contract two weeks early.

Trumbull stayed with Midwest Direct through its contract and printed in-house during the final week before the election.

Of the 30,000-plus mail ballots Midwest Direct was supposed to print and mail for Trumbull, 16,000 were sent on the first day of early voting in 2020 and then it took 11 days before the remaining ballots were mailed as the company processed ballots for other counties.

Skolnick covers politics for the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator.

dskolnick@tribtoday.com