Hydrogels have been known for their mechanoelectrical properties in a way that they can deform in response to external electric fields due to the opposite responses of mobile counterions and constrained backbone charges to the applied field . An inverse process is also possible in which mechanical deformation temporarily modifies electrostatic interactions within the hydrogel structure. For instance, the compressive deformations of copolymer hydrogels of polyacrylic acid (PAA) were shown to generate electrostatic potentials on order several mil- * muzaffar.rafique@bilkent.edu.tr livolts . Similarly, polymethacrylic hydrogels respond to mechanical stretching by producing a deformationdependent electrical potential . The emergence of such electrostatic responses was attributed to changes in the ionic distribution throughout the deformed hydrogel structure. In accord, the coarse-grained molecular dynamics (MD) simulation studies, in which the solvent was modeled implicitly (i.e., no solvent molecules were present in the simulations) with a uniform dielectric constant, demonstrated enhanced electrostatic interactions between counterions and hydrogel backbone charges under mechanical compression , suggesting a deformation-dependent counterion condensation. Simulations with similar coarse-grained models and analytical mean-field level theories also predicted a decreasing ionization (i.e., an increasing condensation) for isotropically compressed hydrogels, owing to the alteration in the concentration of various ionic species as the hydrogel shrinks . All this evidence suggests a strong correlation between the deformation state of a PE hydrogel and the counterion concentration around its chains.