Following an absentee ballot through the process

General election voting in Michigan is underway. Absentee ballots are in the mail or available for pickup and drop boxes are open.

Early in-person voting is already happening in Detroit and goes statewide on Saturday. These relatively new ballot options are changing the culture of voting in Michigan.

No-reason absentee voting, ballot drop boxes, early in-person voting that all begin weeks before Election Day are now all in wide use under reforms adopted under recent amendments to the Michigan Constitution.

“It’s abundantly clear that absentee voting is here to stay,” Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist told the Michigan Public Radio Network.

The COVID pandemic accelerated interest and compelled many voters across the country to be more open to mail-in and drop-off ballots and early in-person voting, said Charles Stewart, a voting expert and political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“And I think in states like Michigan, Virginia, Massachusetts, these other states that were in the middle of making these changes before the pandemic came on, both voters and election officials are trying to figure out what’s the best way to vote and I have to say I think things are still pretty unsettled nationwide,” Stewart said.

Marjorie Meixner of Canton Township was an early adopter and said she has voted both absentee and in person in recent elections.

This year, she signed up to have her ballot mailed to her home, where she filled it out at her kitchen table, slipped it into the return envelope and sealed it.

Meixner said she feels less rushed doing the work at home.

“There’s a lot of candidates this time and a lot of non-partisan candidates, that really takes a little bit more digging,” she said. Meixner also has teenagers who will be of voting age in time for the next election and she likes the fact that she can discuss the issues and the process with them so they will be politically engaged adults.

After she completed her ballot, Meixner drove a few minutes to the nearby Canton Township Municipal Complex, which has two ballot drop boxes.

“All done,” she said after slipping the envelope into the box.

Meixner’s ballot is retrieved from the drop box the following morning and added to the ballots already in-hand. She is alerted by text that her ballot is now officially in the possession of the township clerk.

Meixner’s ballot is now bundled with other ballots and stored in a locked bin.

Siegrist showed Michigan Public Radio how the bins are secured with wound metal cords similar to bike locks. The storage area in the Canton Township building is also locked and only Siegrist and a few staffers have a key card to enter. The key card system also keeps track of who enters the room and when.  

Siegrist said his voters appear to like the diversity of options for casting ballots.

“We are likely to see 60,000 people vote in this election or 61,000 people vote in this election,” he said. “We’re looking at a 50% absentee ballot rate, maybe a 5% or 10% voting early rate and then a 40% or 50% voting on Election Day rate. That’s kind of what it’s shaking out to be. Those are my estimates.”

Election workers will start processing absentee ballots that were mailed in or dropped off the Saturday before the Nov. 5 election date. Siegrist says the first step is to check voter signatures on ballots against electronically stored signatures.

“Their signature will pop up automatically on the screen,” he said. “My specialists will compare the signature on the envelope to the signature that’s in the qualified voter file. In a perfect world those two are going to match. And about 98% of the time, they match sufficiently that we can move the ballot forward for tabulation.” 

Once a ballot clears that step, it’s initialed by an election worker and moved to secured storage until a couple days before the election. Meixner’s ballot is now waiting to be counted. 

“That ballot becomes the property of the people of the State of Michigan,” he said, “and as long as she remains a qualified voter, that ballot will stay in the vault until it is given to the precinct inspectors and the absent voter counting board and the inspectors will open that ballot, they will remove it from the secrecy sleeve and they will tabulate that ballot and it will count.”

At that point, Meixner’s ballot is no longer directly connected to her name. The identifying information on the envelope and the ballot are separated and her ballot, like all the others, is now anonymous.

Once the ballot is fed into a tabulator, it is counted. But the totals for individual races will remain locked in the machine until the polls close on Election Day. At that point, assigned members of the clerk’s staff will punch a code into the machine, which will return a printed tally of the votes. Those results will also be transmitted electronically to the Wayne County clerk’s secure server. The clerk will share the numbers with the public as they are entered into its system.

Siegrist said managing elections is more complicated in some ways, but earlier voting also creates some efficiencies that may speed up counting on election night. He says timely counting contributes to public confidence in elections and he says his constituents appear to like having options.