Michigan voters have a new way to cast ballots before Feb. 27 primary

Four years after Michigan saw a decided and sustained shift toward absentee voting by mail or drop box, election administrators and candidate campaigns are bracing for the impact of early in-person voting as a new way elections could be largely decided ahead of Election Day.

Voters wishing to cast a ballot in the Feb. 27 presidential primary can begin visiting early voting stations on Saturday. Early, in-person voting runs for nine days through Sunday, Feb. 25, and allows a voter to obtain a ballot, fill it out on-site and feed it into a vote-counting tabulator just like if it were Election Day.

The early voting option is available statewide for the first time since voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2022 that made a host of changes to voting rights and election procedures. It differs from traditional absentee voting in which a voter requests a ballot by mail and can mail it back to their municipal clerk or drop it in a secured dropbox outside City Hall or some other government building.

It's unclear what effect early, in-person voting will have on Michigan's voting patterns in the long run — whether it will pull from those already using absentee or those inclined to vote on Election Day — but clerks and campaigns are adjusting strategies, staffing and spending to accommodate the option.

"Where is it going to settle down the road? Hard to say," said Chris Thomas, the retired, longtime state elections director. "I doubt mail is going to fall back into the 30 percentiles.

"We’ll see how much early voting either gathers that (absentee) vote group or more people who vote on Election Day decide to do it early.”

For campaigns, the combination of absentee voting and early in-person options means deploying assets and base-voter messaging earlier while still keeping reserves on hand for independent or undecided voters waiting until Election Day to cast a ballot, said Jamie Roe, a Republican political consultant from Macomb County.

Historically, Democrats have fared better with mail-in absentee votes, while Republicans do better with voters who cast ballots on Election Day.

"We need to bank base votes early and then compete for the late deciders very effectively," Roe said of Republicans. "If we didn’t learn a message in 2022 of how that was done, then shame on us.

"What we can’t continue to do is howl at the moon against early and absentee voting," Roe added.

For city clerks, the people running the most local elections, the new option makes it feel like election season never ends.

Just a few months off the November elections, they’re working hard to recruit election workers, which is proving a unique challenge given additional rules now in place requiring time for people to vote early. It’s an effort that requires creativity. Clerks report they’re working with colleges and even high schools to ensure they have enough temporary staff.

“The difficulty is trying to figure out how many people we even need at this point,” said Kim Meltzer, clerk of Clinton Township.

Because early voting hasn’t existed like this in Michigan before, it’s hard to estimate how many people might take advantage of it. Especially in its first year, the number of early voters may be relatively low, but clerks still need to be ready.

Voting proposals shift behavior

To better understand the potential voting pattern shifts that could result from early in-person voting, officials are looking to a major shift that took place after voters enshrined the right to cast an absentee ballot without any excuse in a separate proposal in 2018.

Historically, in order to get an absentee ballot and vote by mail, a voter had to either be a senior citizen, have a disability that prevented them from going to the polls or was going to be out of town on Election Day. In many cases, voters would use the last excuse. The 2018 constitutional amendment allows for no-reason absentee voting.

The new option, which came into effect during the COVID pandemic, created an immediate spike in the number of people voting absentee. Whereas past elections saw, on average, about a quarter of Michigan's voters voting absentee, that number jumped in November 2020 to 57% of total votes cast, or about 3.2 million of the nearly 5.6 million ballots cast.

In November 2022, without the threat of the pandemic, absentee ballot use evened out to about 42%, or nearly 1.9 million of the 4.5 million votes cast, records show. During that election, Michigan voters passed with nearly 60% support Proposal 2, which added nine days of early voting to the state constitution, created an option for individuals to be added to a permanent absentee ballot list and allowed clerks to pre-process absentee ballots ahead of Election Day.

Early voting works much the same way regular voting does: People show up to a designated location, receive their ballot from a poll worker and fill it out.

They then cast their ballot as they normally would. This is different than absentee voting, which has voters fill out their ballots at home and drop them in the mail or return them directly to a clerk's office.

Absentee voting is still available — early voting is simply an expansion of the options available to voters, and it will be available for every statewide and federal race.

Not every polling place is an early voting location, but voters can look up their early locations on the Secretary of State's website.

In several states that allow for early, in-person voting, voting trends broadly fall into a three-way split, with about a third of voters voting absentee, a third voting early and in-person and a third voting on Election Day, said Thomas, the former state elections director. Other states vary. Georgia, for example, sees about 60% of voters participating in early, in-person voting.

In Michigan, it's unlikely early, in-person voting will see an immediate uptick, Thomas said. "I think this will take some time to grow," he said.

Roe said Republicans would benefit by promoting early, in-person voting, arguing it was a better route than absentee because mistakes could be realized and fixed immediately. But the trend toward early voting also changes the way campaigns are run, requiring more spending earlier in the election cycle.

"It definitely has an impact on your campaign budget, when you have to have resources available and how you deploy those resources to make sure you’re reaching people before they’re voting," Roe said.

Staffing a challenge

However, getting election workers in place may prove challenging in some municipalities across Michigan.

More than six dozen local clerks around the state sent a letter to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in January asking for assistance meeting the requirements put into place by the new law, which forces clerks to both call and email those with permanent mail ballots that they must choose a party affiliation to vote in this month's primary.

In the letter, the clerks noted that their offices have less than 10 employees, often closer to two to four. To run an election, especially in larger cities, it can take hundreds of people.

In Clinton Township and Sterling Heights, clerks both said they were relying on the Macomb County Clerk’s office to help supplement a few additional workers.

Sterling Heights Clerk Melanie Ryska said that her goal is to nearly overstaff polling locations on Election Day, in part to increase the number of people able to answer questions voters may have about the process.

“We really have to combat some of the mis- and disinformation,” Ryska said. “Any time we can get out in the community, raise interest in the process and encourage people to come work with us, it’s part of a consistent multi-faceted effort we’re going to have all through 2024.”

In Dearborn, Clerk George Darany said his team has been trying to carefully toe a line of paying people enough that poll workers — more than 300 people to work on Election Day itself in the city — want to sign up, but not so much that it burns through the entire elections budget.

In many cities, it's difficult to find someone who can work all nine days of early voting plus Election Day, meaning additional people need to be trained and specific schedules need to be developed.

“It costs $125,000 extra every time we do early voting, which is required in all state and federal elections,” Darany said. “It’s a nice chunk of change.”

Clerks aren’t just facing new rules, though. In large part, they’re still fighting battles from years past.

Tensions in 2020 reached a high point as unsubstantiated claims about the validity of the presidential election made national headlines in Michigan. In Detroit, groups tried to disrupt ballot counting after then-President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit in the state saying that observers weren't allowed to watch.

“2020 was not fun,” Darany said.

Election workers were criticized and questioned unfairly, even as they did things completely by the book, Darany said. A notable number of longtime election workers said they wouldn’t come back.

“It got to be too much for people, especially elderly people who weren’t doing it for the money but were instead just doing it for their civic duty,” Darany said. “When tensions flare like it did, it definitely has a negative effect on workers.”

In Dearborn, the clerk’s office works with the police department to ensure that election workers know that if trouble arises, someone is on call to help diffuse issues. Relying on the police department has been beneficial, he said.

One bright spot, Darany said, is that many poll workers are still coming back year after year to help make sure votes are counted quickly and accurately. More than 50,000 city residents will vote in November, he estimated. This year, Michigan residents vote not only for president but also for a new senator and in state races.

“We’re certainly anticipating some excitement this year, but we’ll be prepared for it,” Darany said.

hharding@detroitnews.com

eleblanc@detroitnews.com