Geauga County, Ohio

Ohio's first day of in-person early voting saw turnout jump sharply compared with the 2022 midterms, even as absentee ballot requests have fallen well below both 2022 and 2018 levels. Statewide, 42,868 votes were cast on the first day, with in-person early voting up 138% across 77 counties tracked by The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com. Cuyahoga County saw a 249% increase and Hamilton County a 175% increase, with similar surges in smaller counties. Meanwhile, absentee ballot requests are down about 18% from 2022 and 14% from 2018, a decline seen in both Republican- and Democratic-leaning areas.

Political scientists attribute much of the shift to President Trump's efforts to restrict mail voting, which may be pushing Democrats toward in-person voting out of concern their ballots won't count, while also discouraging some Republicans who have heard Trump's criticism of mail balloting. Ohio's competitive U.S. Senate race between Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown, and governor's race between Vivek Ramaswamy and Amy Acton, are also driving interest. Analysts caution it's too early to draw firm conclusions about November's outcome from early turnout data alone.

Immigration attorneys and advocates across the country report that as of September 15, immigrants with final removal orders are no longer listed in ICE's online detainee locator, the database used to find people in federal custody. NBC4 independently verified several detainees with final orders missing from the system. In one case, an Ohio attorney said she could not locate her client, a Zimbabwean nurse with a longstanding withholding-of-removal order, for 32 hours after an "irregular" ICE check-in turned into a detention and transfer to a Louisiana facility. Attorneys say ICE officers have cited new internal orders not to disclose the location of detainees with final removal orders, though ICE has issued no formal public notice of the change.

The shift coincides with the Trump administration's push to deport people to third countries rather than their home nations, a workaround for withholding-of-removal protections. The Supreme Court recently allowed that third-country deportation policy to proceed while agreeing to hear arguments on its legality in December. Advocates say the database change makes it harder to file emergency legal challenges before removals occur.

West Geauga, Kenston and Chardon each earned five-star overall ratings on Ohio's 2025-26 school report cards, outpacing the statewide district average of 3.8 stars. West Geauga was the only district in Ohio to score five stars across all six graded categories: achievement, progress, gap closing, early literacy, graduation, and readiness for college, career, workforce or military service. Kenston and Chardon both improved from 4.5 stars last year to five.

Berkshire earned four stars overall, with a standout 98.2% graduation rate but a weak two-star early literacy score. Cardinal earned 3.5 stars, its Performance Index inching up to 76.7 but still below the state average of 82.8. West Geauga posted the county's highest Performance Index and graduation rate at 98.9%. All five districts kept chronic absenteeism below the statewide average of 23.9%. District leaders credited staff, families and community support for the results.

Geauga Transit, the rural demand-response transportation system in Geauga County, Ohio, is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a free open house on Sept. 30. The system began in 1976 with a $25,000 state and federal grant and two vehicles; it now operates a growing fleet including propane-powered buses after Lake County-based Laketran took over management in July 2023. Ridership reached 32,542 trips in 2024, up 16% from the prior year, and the agency secured $3.5 million in funding for fleet, facility and workforce transportation improvements, including a Wheels to Work program launched in October 2024 serving commuters near Middlefield and Parkman.

A larger expansion is now underway. In November 2025, Laketran and Geauga Transit announced about $2.3 million in Ohio Workforce Mobility Partnership funding for a three-year initiative to expand demand-response service between Lake and Geauga counties, adding vehicles, drivers and higher wages to build a shared driver pool. The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency approved the roughly $3 million project for its regional transportation plan on March 13, though no passenger-service launch date has been set.