The 39-year-old Trotwood woman’s absentee ballot arrived a couple of days earlier, but she still hadn’t filled it out.

“It’s voting time and I still don’t know where either side stands on the issues … all I’ve heard is a lot of bickering,” she told a group of fellow Southwest Ohioans during a Your Voice Ohio Zoom meeting Oct. 7.

It was the first time the woman talked to anyone this year about the presidential election because she feared being shamed or attacked again.

That’s what happened after people found out she voted for Donald Trump in 2016 after voting for Barack Obama before that. Her name is being withheld to avoid any more blowback.

This year, the civic duty to help choose the next U.S. president weighs heavy.

“If you don’t pick the right person,” the woman said, “it could like, literally, be a civil war that goes on in our country.”

Ohioans were uneasy a month away from Election Day.

The 2020 presidential election feels different, they said, with more at stake.

They’re not only worried about the deep and bitter divisions separating Americans, they’re fearful about where the country is heading even as the deadly pandemic — which has already killed more than 5,075 Ohioans — rages.

UNITED IN CONCERN

Others in the Southwest Ohio YVO group were not asked and did not say who they supported. But based on what they said about the candidates and the issues, they appeared to break this way: One Trump voter, two Joe Biden voters, and a Libertarian supporting that party’s candidate, Jo Jorgensen.

But all expressed some level of concern.

“I’m scared and worried about our country and the young children growing up,” said James Porter, an 82-year-old retired school teacher who lives in the GOP stronghold of Warren County.

He said about eight of every 10 signs on his street are for Trump and he thinks his county will likely vote for Trump again.

“But that doesn’t mean everyone is happy with Trump,” he said. “I think we’re disgusted with both sides.”

Michelle MacCutcheon, a former membership coordinator for Ohio’s Libertarian party, said the pandemic has prompted people across the country to tighten their circles with people of “like thought and like mind” and that gave people a bolder voice.

“And also we’re angry … at the fact that COVID and our government or however you want to look at it, took these things away from us,” she said.

Whether it was losing time with someone in a nursing home, or, like MacCutcheon, missing the birth of a grandchild, those are moments gone forever.

VOTING CONCERNS

There also were worries about the election process itself, particularly during the pandemic — when so many Ohioans are voting early or voting absentee — and amid such deep political division. Some worried about intimidation, or even violence at the polls. They also worried about how long it would take to determine who won — Trump or Biden.

David Funck, who lives in suburban Cincinnati, said it’s “unconscionable” that some politicians are demeaning the U.S. Postal Service and its ability to deliver ballots and elections in general.

At the same time, he pointed out the fight over allowing only a single ballot drop box in each of Ohio’s 88 counties, no matter if thousands of voters or more than a million live in the county.

“The question becomes why are we not able to provide safe voting in every manner to everyone at this point,” Funck said.

Funck, who put much of the blame for the divide in the country on Trump and the GOP, said he was surprised there were any undecided voters left so close to such a monumental election.