Even though Republican lawmakers and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer struck a last-minute deal to give Michigan clerks a head start on absentee ballot processing, scattered acceptance means election results won’t come faster this November.
“The reality is the bill came so close to the election,” Michigan Department of State spokesperson Jake Rollow said Tuesday, “and some clerks have already hired their staff or just aren’t quite sure that the tradeoff is worth it because of the limited scope of the bill.”
Rollow said the department, which oversees elections and voting, expects it will take 24 hours after polls close on election night until all ballots are counted and unofficial results have been reported. That’s how long it took in 2020.
House Bill 4491 passed in late September on the last day of session before the November election, and Whitmer signed it 11 days ago.
The new law allows election workers to take ballots out of their return envelopes and check that the ballot number matches that envelope. Ballots are to stay in their secrecy envelopes, however, and won’t be counted until polls open at 7 a.m. on Election Day.
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A day of preprocessing was temporarily allowed for municipalities of 25,000 or more people in the 2020 election, and clerks were outspoken in wanting it back. The new law applies to municipalities of at least 10,000.
“It may be more useful in 2024 when clerks have more lead time on it,” Rollow said, “but in this election, we don’t expect that it will impact the timing of results.”
The Detroit News found at least six of Michigan’s 10 largest municipalities will not preprocess ballots this year, citing reasons like not being able to pay workers more or expecting fewer absentee ballots than in 2020.
Cities like Detroit, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor plan to preprocess this fall, the News reported, but others like Lansing, Dearborn and Livonia won’t.
“As I warned, the pre-processing bill that the legislature put forward did not go nearly far enough to make it worthwhile to the vast majority of our local clerks,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat, tweeted Monday. “We need to allow for more of the process to occur during pre-processing if we want to actually see results faster.”
Ever since Michiganders approved no-excuse absentee voting via constitutional amendment in 2018, about half of voters have cast ballots by mail. That was true in the August primary, when around 1.1 million people voted absentee, and Rollow expects a similar breakdown in November.
As of Monday, clerks have sent out 1,676,958 absentee ballots, state department data shows, and received 432,960 completed ballots.
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Another thing that won’t speed up election results is some municipalities having to physically transport election results from vote tabulators at polling places to main offices. AT&T this year stopped supporting the 3G modems inside some tabulators, so in August the computer cards inside holding election results had to be hand-delivered for processing.
“In the grand scheme of unofficial results being reported, I don’t think that will be the thing that pushes us past 24 hours by any stretch,” Rollow said. “That’s going to come down to absentee ballot counting and those processes that need to be carried out.”
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