Belmont County Preps for Primary Election on May 3 | News, Sports, Jobs

Photo by Robert A. DeFrank – Belmont County Board of Elections members Robert Quirk, left, and Frankie Carnes meet last Wednesday to approve ballot printing for the May 3 primaries.

The Belmont County Board of Elections is preparing for the May 3 primary election.

Locally, a commissioner’s seat and the auditor’s seat will be up for election in Belmont County. According to the board of elections, Commissioner Jerry Echemann and Auditor Cindi Henry each submitted their names for the ballot; as of Monday, the incumbents were uncontested.

Other races on the ballot include the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, two justices of the Ohio Supreme Court, governor, lieutenant governor, Ohio attorney general, Ohio auditor, Ohio secretary of state and Ohio treasurer. At the federal level, voters will choose a representative for the 6th Congressional District and a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Rob Portman, who is not seeking re-election.

Representatives will be chosen for the 95th and 96th Ohio House districts, with some uncertainty remaining about which district a couple of local townships will lie in. The redistricting process remains incomplete.

Also on the ballot will be a 7th District Court of Appeals judge, one Ohio Board of Education member and four Ohio Central Committee members — two men and two women.

“There’s a lot of that that will be up for the primary election,” Belmont County Assistant Election Director Kamron Chervenak said. “The filing deadline is (4 p.m.) Feb. 2. The governor will be up, the secretary of state will be up.”

The deadline for the board to certify candidate petitions is Feb. 14.

“Then we’ll know who’s on the ballot,” Chervenak said, adding that the staff must check all the signatures on the petitions to “make sure they’re filled out correctly, make sure the signatures fall within the jurisdiction of that candidate. We have to check all that stuff.”

In other matters last week, the board approved the bid from Graphic Village to print ballots for the primary election at a cost of $250 per 1,000 ballots, for a grand total of $18,750 based on an estimated 75,000 ballots.

The other bidders were Election IQ, which bid $265 per 1,000 ballots, and Integrated Voting Systems, which bid $240 per 1,000 ballots.