By Zachary Gorchow
Executive Editor and Publisher
Posted: May 23, 2022 10:58 AM

One of the few areas of election policy with bipartisan support, allowing clerks to preprocess absentee ballots prior to election days, might not be renewed for this year after an experiment with it in the November 2020 election.

Clerks are all but pleading with the Legislature to act, and preprocessing is the top priority of a national group, Secure Democracy USA, that visited with legislators and some reporters this week. But the chairs of the House and Senate elections committees, while not opposed to the idea, are in no rush to act, both said in interviews.

The advent of no-reason absentee voting, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, caused a massive increase in the use of absentee ballots in the 2020 election cycle, up from about one-quarter of all votes cast to 57 percent, or more than 3 million of the 5.57 million ballots cast. That greatly increased the workload for clerks and election workers because they must verify signatures on the envelope in which the ballot is returned, open the envelope and unfold the ballot so it can be tabulated.

Just in time for the November 2020 election, the Legislature passed and Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed PA 177 of 2020 that allowed communities with populations of 25,000 or more to conduct signature matching on the envelope and remove the ballot from the envelope between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. the day before the election.

While some communities did use the mechanism, many – even those that were eligible – did not. Clerks had voiced a preference for allowing preprocessing to begin at least two days before election day, that what was provided was not enough time and too close to election day to make a difference.

Most communities tabulate in-person precinct votes first. That meant on election night of November 2020, Republican candidates like former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senate candidate John James were shown as leading the Democratic candidates. That, in reality, was misleading because Republican voters tended to vote in person and Democratic voters tended to vote absentee.

It took many jurisdictions longer than usual to count their absentee ballots because there were so many more and by Wednesday evening now-President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Bloomfield Township) passed Mr. Trump and Mr. James, respectively, in the vote count.

Even as election officials had explained repeatedly that absentee ballots would be tallied after in-person votes, the situation still contributed to conspiracy theories, fomented by Mr. Trump and believed by many Republican voters, that fraud had taken place. Countless investigations and audits show there was no substantial fraud in the election.

Thirty-eight states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, allow election officials to begin processing absentee and mail ballots prior to Election Day. Florida, for example, allows preprocessing to begin as soon as the ballot is received. Ohio also allows preprocessing prior to Election Day at a time to be set by its board of elections.

Sen. Ruth Johnson (R-Groveland Township), chair of the Senate Elections Committee, has introduced a bill (SB 334) that would bring back preprocessing of absentee ballots for the 2022 cycle but has yet to move it out of her committee. It was put on the agenda for a hearing a year ago amid action on dozens of elections bills but unlike the others never cleared the committee.

Ms. Johnson said she won't move the bill without negotiations on election law changes with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who vetoed a slew of Republican-passed bills, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who has excoriated Republicans in the Legislature for moving several bills tightening voting access.

"I'm still looking at it. It was my bill to begin with so obviously I support the concept," she said. "You can't just pick one out of the bunch. You have to look at it as a whole."

Ms. Johnson linked that bill to separate legislation expanding polling locations and training of elections and poll workers. She cited HB 4492, which Ms. Whitmer vetoed, that would have expanded polling places to other buildings such as senior housing facilities.

Ms. Whitmer said the bill would have made it more difficult for seniors and persons living in large apartment complexes to vote.

"I'm obviously supportive. I'm the author of that bill. We'd like to do it again. But we'd like to make sure clerks have a place to conduct elections," she said. "It's called negotiations. You can't just do what you want when it doesn't fix the problems."

Rep. Ann Bollin (R-Brighton) was less enthusiastic about the concept of preprocessing than Ms. Johnson. A former township clerk, Ms. Bollin said the idea is "not off the radar but it has not been at the top of the priority list."

Ms. Bollin said her committee's priority has been expanding polling locations and improving training for signature verification and challengers.

She also noted there is still ample time to get a preprocessing law in place for the November election, recalling action on the 2020 measure came in October.

"Now that is not the best way to plan for an election but I think there is still time to have that conversation," she said.

Further, there is no guarantee as many voters will vote absentee in 2022 as did in 2020, Ms. Bollin said. She opposes disrupting election laws for unknowns.

Further, Ms. Bollin said she knows clerks who urged no-reason absentee voting for years and at no time did she recall a single clerk saying more time would be needed to process ballots. Instead, other moves like the allowance for joint absentee counting boards plus the grants some communities have received for high-speed tabulators could avoid the need for preprocessing, she said.

"I don't think we change all of our election laws based on the 2020 election," she added.

Her priority now is to update the voter rolls, Ms. Bollin said.

This week a national group, Secure Democracy USA, which is positioning itself in the middle on election law changes, came to Lansing to urge legislation that it saw having the potential for bipartisan support and high impact. A better preprocessing law is at the top of that list, said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy for the group.

Michigan's election law needs to catch up to the changes brought about by Proposal 3 of 2018, which enshrined no-reason absentee voting in the state Constitution, Mr. Griffith said.

Of the inertia surrounding this issue, Mr. Griffith said he thinks the Legislature will appreciate the need for clerks to have a couple days to preprocess ballots.

The group also wants Michigan to authorize early voting where persons could come to a voting site before Election Day and cast their vote without it having to go through the absentee process and have to be sealed in an envelope and be subject to signature verification. Further, the state needs to statutorily have a process for voters to cure ballots if there is a problem with their signature. Presently, there is only guidance from the secretary of state to clerks on this matter, and the courts have held that must be done through the administrative rules process. The Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, unhappy with the rules Ms. Benson has promulgated, has blocked them for now.

Compared to other states, Michigan appears to be more fertile ground for agreement on election law changes, Mr. Griffith said.