LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, to get a hand count of a full ballot with dozens of contests, “Americans would have to wait weeks, if not several months to get an accurate results.” That’s where tabulators came in to produce faster and more accurate results.

However, with the introduction of Michigan’s no-excuse absentee ballot voting law which was passed in 2018 via a statewide ballot proposal, about 1/2 of the votes for Michigan elections come in the form of absentee ballots which delays the fast results that everyone had planned for with the tabulators.

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To speed up the counting, the Michigan legislature passed a law in September that enables Michigan clerks in municipalities of at least 10,000 voters to pre-process absentee ballots two days before the election. The bill was passed in a bipartisan manner and signed by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

House Bill 4491, as passed by the Senate and signed by Gov. Whitmer, allows an option for clerks to open the outer/return envelopes containing an absentee ballot inside a secrecy sleeve starting between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. on the Sunday and Monday before Election Day. They will then verify the ballot number on the ballot stub to make
sure it agrees with the ballot number on the AV ballot return envelope label. They will then store the secrecy sleeve with the ballot for storage in a secure container.

At least one election inspector from each major party has to be present at the pre-processing location at all times and SOS policies and procedures have to be followed including never leaving the AV ballot secrecy envelopes unattended. The ballots won’t be counted by a tabulator until the polls open at 7 a.m. on Election Day.

After signing the bill, Whitmer’s office celebrated the law as one that will help “Michigan catch up to other states that provide the right to vote absentee to all voters.” Former Secretary of State and current state Senator Ruth Johnson applauded the bill and said it would speed up a very “time consuming process.” Johnson is also chair of the Senate Elections Committee.

However, not everyone is coming on board with the pre-processing and Jake Rollow, spokesperson for Michigan Department of State, says that we should expect about 24 hours after the polls close before we get unofficial election results in Michigan – which also happened during the 2020 general election.

Rollow told Michigan News Source, “Because state legislative leaders did not pass the preprocessing bill until the 11th hour, and it is limited in scope (26 hours, only for jurisdictions with populations over 10,000, and doesn’t allow ballots to come out of secrecy sleeves), many clerks won’t utilize it this year. Many clerks have already hired and trained their election workers and don’t have additional time to implement these processes this year. The law may be more impactful in 2024.”

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The bill to pre-process the absentee ballots was introduced back in the spring of 2021 and only passed recently at the end of September of this year.

According to Washtenaw Clerk/Register of Deeds, Ed Golembiewski, four our of five jurisdictions within his county will be pre-processing but other municipalities like Livonia, Sterling Heights, Dearborn and Lansing won’t.

Ingham County Clerk and Democrat Barb Byrum tweeted out this this week, “We need to allow for more of the process to occur during pre-processing if we want to actually see results faster.”

Daniel Baxter, who oversees absentee ballot processing in Detroit, will be preprocessing the ballots even though he thinks the remedy to quickly counting AV ballots is to be able to tabulate them ahead of time as well. He expects that his election workers could be processing close to 100K absentee ballots on November 8th.

Today is the deadline for jurisdictions to notify the Bureau of Elections if they will be using the two pre-processing days and they will have a complete list of those jurisdictions after today.

In addition to the slow absentee vote counting, there are also municipalities who will be physically transporting election results to vote tabulators like they did during the last election because of the modem issue inside of their own tabulators not being compatible because they are 3G modems.

To date, clerks have sent out almost 1,677,000 absentee ballots and a little more than 432,000 have been returned.
Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a statement that voters in Michigan “deserve to get their election results on election night” – but that doesn’t appear to be something that will be happing this election.