The options for Michiganders to cast votes early and in-person officially kicks off for the first time statewide Saturday, but not all Michiganders will have the same experience.
Different approaches led to a lot of variation in just how much access to early, in-person voting Michiganders have. Benzie County, with 16,900 registered voters, has planned 14 early voting sites — similar to their regular polling places —while Saginaw County’s more than 158,000 voters have just a single place to cast an in-person ballot before election day.
Thirty-three of Michigan’s 83 counties opted to have single, county-wide early voting locations, according to data provided to MLive by the Michigan Department of State.
Vanessa Guerra, Saginaw County’s clerk, said they intended to take a cautious approach,
“This being the first time that we’ve done this, we wanted to be conscious of how we spent taxpayer dollars and we want to ensure that we were able to do this right the first time before we thought about expanding to multiple sites,” Guerra said.
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Exactly how to implement the early in-person option is left up to local election officials who choose from three approaches: county-run early voting, the county coordinating multiple sites with municipal clerks, or for municipalities to go at it alone with their own early voting plans.
“We left it up to clerks because a clerk in Houghton may have different things than a clerk in Rochester Hills in terms of their resources and what their voters need,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at a press conference.
Benson noted that Oakland County is running its own 25 voting sites.
In Benzie, early voting was left up to individual municipalities, in part because the county didn’t feel it had a single location large enough to service every jurisdiction. Crystal Lake Township Clerk Judy VanMeter said “clerks all over the state have a lot of extra work” due to the changes to Michigan’s voting laws.
She said they didn’t expect many voters to show, given much of their retiree-heavy population was out-of-state for the winter.
There has been friction between the state and local clerks over the transition, as more options for voters come with more needs for equipment and staff. A Jan. 11 letter to Benson and Director of Elections Jonathan Brater from 74 local clerks said the clerks were “losing sleep” trying to come into compliance with the new laws and suffered “anguish and astronomical expense.”
Michigan etched in-person early voting into the state constitution when 60% of voters approved in November 2022 Proposal 2, which also included a slew of other changes to how Michigan conducts elections.
More: Here are 6 ways voting in Michigan will be different in 2024
The state set aside $30 million in last year’s budget to reimburse early voting costs, including the purchase of new equipment like ballot-on-demand printers.
“As we allocated the state funding and resources that we received to the local jurisdictions, it was related to how they chose to manage their own voting site,” Benson said.
Guerra, of Saginaw County, also doesn’t expect many voters to take advantage of the new option, and cost remains front of mind for her.
To offer more early voting sites, “we would really need to see significant turnout because it is a very, very costly endeavor,” Guerra said. “Because it’s nine days before Election Day, which is nine days of hiring people to work.”
Distance may also play a factor for use of the new option in Michigan’s more rural regions.
In Schoolcraft County, in the central Upper Peninsula, the drive to that county’s sole early voting location, in Manistique on the shore of Lake Michigan, could be as much as 50 miles from the county’s northern border. It’s one of only 26 early voting locations in the Upper Peninsula.
An early voting alternative that may be more convenient for some voters — if they haven’t already requested an absentee ballot — is going directly to their clerk’s office within 14 days of an election, requesting an absentee ballot, filling it out and returning it then and there.
The only difference between this and early in-person voting is that those absentee ballots will be counted with the rest of the mail-in vote, rather than immediately fed into a tabulator. Still, last year’s election law changes allow clerks in towns larger than 5,000 to begin processing returned absentee ballots up to 8 days before the election.
In Ann Arbor, city Clerk Jacqueline Beaudry has set up six early voting locations, in part to meet the demand with the town’s heavy student population. Washtenaw County is coordinating with municipalities to offer 15 sites in total.
“We certainly would not want to have not enough sites and then offer people the opportunity to early vote only to have long lines at city hall, for example,” Beaudry said. “Our (city) council has been very supportive of implementing same-day voter registration and also early voting initiatives.”
Note: Voters can search for the nearest early voting location with this Michigan Department of State tool.