Michigan’s mail-in ballot preprocessing law speeds up results, clerks say

Officials in Michigan, taking advantage of new laws that allow them to prepare mail-in ballots for counting before Election Day, found that they could announce results more quickly in the August primary, but not without some problems.

Under extended Preprocessing Laws in MichiganPoll workers can receive returned mail-in ballots, check signatures, open envelopes, make sure the correct ballot was returned, and scan them through the counting machine, but they cannot yet count the votes. In communities with more than 5,000 residents, poll workers can start counting eight days before the election; in smaller towns, poll workers can do so as early as the Monday before the election. Poll workers do not announce the total number of votes until polls close on Election Day.

Across the state, results were available more quickly due to preprocessing after polls closed, Jonathan Brater, director of the state elections office, told the state election board on Monday.

“It speeds up the process and makes Election Day a little easier because hopefully you’ve already processed the majority of your mail-in ballots and are just waiting for the last ones to arrive,” Brater said.

Detroit, Grand Rapids and Canton with strong lead

For Detroit, that made all the difference, city elections director Daniel Baxter told Votebeat. The city spent about five days on vote preprocessing and Election Day, and that allowed more than 80% of absentee ballot results to be reported by about 10:30 p.m. That avoided the worst of the long delays that can fuel concerns about election malpractice, Baxter said.

“In 2020, when the numbers switched from Trump to Biden, one of the problems people noticed was that there was a large amount of votes cast in southeast Michigan,” Baxter said. That was because poll workers couldn’t start processing mail-in ballots until Election Day, and Detroit had more than 174,000 mail-in ballots, compared to only about 83,000 votes on Election Day.

With this year’s primary results, Baxter said, “we wanted to make sure the lion’s share of coverage was on the 11 o’clock news. We successfully accomplished that goal, and preprocessing helped us tremendously.”

He expects Detroit to use all eight days provided by state law this fall.

In Howell, the largest city in Livingston County, officials tried preprocessing for the first time during the presidential primary in February. They tried it for a single day and it worked well, Susie Jarson, deputy clerk and elections coordinator, wrote in an email. The head start allowed controllers to go through all the mail-in ballots received by then and eased pressure on the absentee ballot counting committee on Election Day.

But they did not succeed in doing so in the primaries in August.

“We did not have the full control committee available that day,” Jarson said. “Control persons with two different party affiliations are required, and on that day we only had a small group available, all of whom belonged to the same party.”

Jarson said officials hope to continue preprocessing votes in November, as they expect there will be significantly more ballots than in August. relatively low voter turnout in the primariesbut they are waiting to see if they can do it.

In Canton Township, Clerk Michael Siegrist said preprocessing allowed crews to count absentee ballots before the ballot count on Election Day. In Grand Rapids, several days of preprocessing helped the city catch up by Sunday, so staff only had to process a few days’ worth of ballots on Election Day, said Robert Macomber, Kent County’s deputy clerk.

It also helps that municipalities have more days – and more freedom – to process ballots than they used to have. When the preprocessing law first took effect in 2022, officials in the state’s largest municipalities only had the Sunday and Monday before the election to begin processing, and they were limited in what they could do. Officials could only open envelopes and verify signatures, but they could not yet put ballots into the ballot machine. Back then many employees felt There simply wasn’t enough time for the less time-consuming parts of the work.

But with the law recasting additional days and more flexibility in 2023, this option has helped deliver faster results in places that choose to use it.

“Overall, yes, a benefit, and I think you will see local clerks fine-tune the number of days needed for the general as they monitor absentee candidate response rates in real time,” Macomber wrote in an email.

Flint did not use any preprocessing and the results took a while

Some counties have not yet tried preprocessing. In Flint, for example, officials did not preprocess ballots during the primary election and results were not available until the next morning, angering City Council members. During a council meeting earlier this month, members said it was “ridiculous that it’s taking this long.”

“The fact that we are the last in the district to announce the results just adds fuel to the fire of conspiracy theories and all sorts of other things,” said Councilman Dennis Pfeiffer, suggesting that the city may need someone else to conduct the elections.

Davina Donahue, the city clerk in Flint, responded that the city has over 5,000 absentee ballots, which slows down processing, and that it also has the most voting precincts of any municipality in Genesee County. Donahue did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment.

MLive reported that Genesee County Clerk Domonique Clemons encouraged Flint to process ballots in advance, but the city decided not to begin processing until Election Day.

In less populated parts of the state, officials report they largely do not use preprocessing because it simply isn’t necessary. In Dickinson County in the Upper Peninsula, county clerk Carol Bronzyk said none of the cities in her jurisdiction do so because their populations are not high enough to require it. The largest city in Dickinson is Iron Mountain, with about 7,500 residents.

“Maybe someone will consider that in the future, but I just don’t think our communities are big enough or have enough votes right now to do that,” Bronzyk said.

In areas with a higher population density, releasing results quickly means they will be available sooner. That will make a difference not only in the August primary, but also in November, when all eyes will be on Michigan as a swing state.

The expansion of preprocessing rules has been a long time coming, said Baxter, of Detroit, who began working in elections in 1985 and began processing mail-in ballots in 1998.

“Since then, I’ve been trying to take advantage of something like that,” he said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. You can reach Hayley at [email protected].