CELINA, Ohio — Mercer County voted the way Mercer County usually votes on Tuesday: overwhelmingly Republican. While Ohioans statewide elected Democrat Amy Acton as governor and returned Democrat Sherrod Brown to the U.S. Senate, Mercer County backed their Republican opponents by better than three-to-one margins, according to Associated Press tabulations of the county’s unofficial results with 35 of 36 precincts reporting.
In the governor’s race, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy carried Mercer County with 13,665 votes to Acton’s 3,710, with Libertarian Don Kissick receiving 628, per the AP’s Mercer County reporting unit. That is a home-county split in the opposite direction from the statewide result, where Acton was called the winner on election night.
The Senate numbers told the same story. Republican Jon Husted received 13,755 votes in Mercer County to Brown’s 3,489, with Libertarian William Redpath at 491 and independent Greg Levy at 286, according to the AP. Brown nevertheless won the statewide special election for the unexpired Senate term, defeating the appointed incumbent.
Mercer County’s strongest consensus came on State Issue 3, the constitutional amendment writing Ohio’s photo ID requirement for in-person voting into the state constitution. The AP’s county tabulation showed 15,357 Mercer County voters in favor and 2,680 against — about 85 percent yes in a county where the measure passed statewide as well.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on: the figures above are unofficial election-night tabulations reported by the Associated Press from the county’s returns, and they cover the statewide races and Issue 3. Outcomes in Mercer County’s local contests — including the county commissioner and auditor races on the Nov. 3 ballot — had not been posted in a form this newsroom could verify overnight, and no local outcome is reported here until the Mercer County Board of Elections publishes its own numbers.
All results remain unofficial until they are certified. The Ohio Secretary of State’s election-night reporting notes that the official canvass is completed approximately three weeks after the election, once county boards review provisional ballots and any qualifying overseas and military ballots that arrive within the post-election window.
For Mercer County voters, the practical picture is a county that moved one way while the state moved the other: its preferred candidates for governor and senator lost statewide, while the voter ID amendment it supported by the widest margin of the night is now part of the Ohio Constitution. What happens next is the canvass — the board of elections’ official count in the coming weeks will confirm the local winners who will take office in Celina in January.
Photo: Eric Lochtefeld, CC BY-SA 4.0