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Michigan set itself up to blaze through its 2024 ballot counts.
New policies were in the state’s favor, including pre-processing of absentee ballots as well as early in-person voting, and voters and election officials took full advantage.
But elections are ultimately a human process, from who participates in them to who runs them. And it was mostly a set of human factors that prevented the state from releasing unofficial results until the middle of the day on Wednesday.
Getting results any faster in future elections is likely to prove difficult, officials say. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to try.
“If you had twice as many people and more resources from the state, that would speed up that process quite significantly,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at a press conference Wednesday morning.
If officials had as many election workers counting absentee ballots Tuesday as they had in 2020, she said, they could have potentially finished earlier. This year’s slimmed-down workforce, however, had the benefit of stretching its counting work over several days ahead of Election Day so the count didn’t extend as long as in 2020.
It was that daylong wait for results in 2020 that allowed conspiracy theories to grow and prompted protesters to demand a stop to the count. In the years since, voters and officials alike have become eager to make sure ballots are counted quickly and accurately.
How clerks’ decisions affected speed
Before Tuesday, it seemed a potential bottleneck would be in the Macomb County city of Warren, where City Clerk Sonja Buffa said she would not pre-process absentee ballots. In pre-processing, which is sometimes referred to as early tabulation, election officials can open the absentee ballot envelopes, verify that signatures match what is on file for that voter, and feed the ballot into a tabulator. Those votes aren’t counted until after polls close.
Warren is the third-largest city in the state, and more than 25,000 voters returned absentee ballots for the general election. More than 200 other cities across Michigan opted to pre-process their absentee ballots. Officials including Benson and Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini suggested that Buffa’s decision could mean Warren would delay decisive results for the state.
Well after polls closed in Warren, the cordoned-off floor of City Hall whirred with high-speed machines opening envelopes and tabulating ballots, and dozens of people did the manual work of preparing ballots for the machines and organizing them for storage. Teams ensured voters had returned their correct ballot and verified signatures as a half-dozen poll challengers and team members from the Secretary of State’s office, sent to assist however necessary, looked on.
Absentee ballot processing went relatively quickly in Warren, but it still took teams until after midnight to get through the volume. Around 2 a.m., when Buffa turned in the paperwork and files for almost the entire city’s votes to Forlini’s office, she said she never doubted that Warren would get it done before the end of the night.
“I have a great team,” she said. “I have a lot of confidence in my team.”
In many other cities, early tabulation of absentee ballots meant that clerks were able to focus their election night resources almost entirely on ballots cast on Election Day. In Sterling Heights, a neighboring city to Warren that has a nearly identical population and saw a similar number of absentee ballots returned, pre-processing meant the election team had handled more than 20,000 ballots by midday Tuesday.
“It’s really relieved a whole lot of Election Day stress,” Sterling Heights Clerk Melanie Ryska said around 5 p.m. from the empty lobby of City Hall, which had been buzzing earlier with registering voters and other city business. “The fact that we’re through something like 20,000 votes already is enormous.”
The city had nearly 75,000 votes cast in total, according to unofficial results. About 20,000 were cast during early in-person voting, meaning that Sterling Heights officials had to worry about only the few thousand absentee ballots that were returned on Election Day and ballots from the roughly 28,000 voters who chose to vote on Tuesday.
Ryska said she was exhausted — early voting is like running an election daily for almost two weeks — but was excited to be able to move through more quickly than in past years. Early in-person and day-of votes are much faster to count, because voters put their own ballots into the tabulators, and election officials don’t have to do as much verification after the fact.
“The process still takes time. It’s not like we’re going to be done at midnight,” Ryska said. “But it’s all much smoother.”
How voter decisions had an impact
The 3.4 million Michigan voters who voted early helped lighten the load on Election Day, but that still left 2.2 million ballots to count once the polls closed.
In parts of Macomb County, Detroit, and other places around the state, some voters didn’t get to cast their ballots until after 8 p.m. because of long lines. Those polling places couldn’t close down operations until everyone waiting in line had a chance to finish voting..
Reporting results takes time even after that — polling places must be closed up following very specific guidelines, and ballots and records must be secured before they can be transported. In most of Michigan, election materials are then driven into a central location in the city (usually city hall or election offices) before results can be and reported.
But there were other things that add to the time. When voters choose to write in candidates (or even just fill in a write-in bubble on their ballot, whether or not they actually name a candidate), those marks are scanned by the tabulators and printed as images on a tape, similar to a cash register receipt, that poll workers retrieve and check after closing down the machines.
The tapes list vote totals for every candidate and question on the ballot, and they can be several feet long even if there aren’t many write-in votes. In August’s low-turnout primary, the tapes were at least 20 feet long in Canton. Officials go through each of those names shown on the write-in boxes to see whether they match registered write-in candidates, and record the vote totals separately.
Many precincts saw hundreds of write-in votes cast. In Warren, Buffa had to spend more than an hour closing up a polling place as she pieced the tapes together, including some where voters had written in “free Palestine” or “make America great again” rather than a name.
As Forlini waited for cities and townships to bring in their paperwork, he said that some precincts took more than two and a half hours just to print those tapes. That meant results couldn’t come in any sooner.
“I don’t know I’ve ever seen them that long,” he said, looking at pictures sent to him by local officials of tapes that appeared inches thick when folded like ribbon candy.
What can be done in the future
Many of the speed bumps that prevented election results from getting in any sooner were unavoidable. There was the expected, such as record turnout that caused long lines in some places, as well as the unexpected, like the poll worker who crashed into a pole while transporting ballots to the Wayne County office, as Fox 2 reported. (The poll worker is expected to be OK.)
Detroit, which expected to have results in as early as the wee hours on Wednesday, wasn’t able to finish processing ballots until nearly 10 a.m., partly because it took a lot of time to transport absentee ballots from drop boxes around the 140-square-mile city to Detroit’s Department of Elections office in the New Center neighborhood, where signatures were verified, and then to the Huntington Place convention hall downtown, where those ballots were ultimately fed into tabulators.
Machines do the counting, but getting to that point in Michigan is still a largely human process. It takes time for people to verify signatures and smooth out ballots. It takes time to fill out the paperwork that accompanies ballots from one location to another. It takes time to verify who was writing in a legitimate candidate and who was trying to elect Mickey Mouse (who has not submitted his write-in candidacy by the deadline) to their local city council.
The state can offer assistance in the form of more high-speed machines, as Benson suggested, but much of the most tedious work can’t be automated.
More people could be brought in, but that’s not necessarily simple either. Election workers regularly work for many hours doing the same task over and over, and it can be difficult to find people who both want to do such tasks and who can work a day that can stretch more than 16 hours. And if a community can find those people, the next challenge is funding: How do you pay people enough to want to work without diverting money from the other things municipal clerks do, such as licensing or maintaining city records?
It’s likely that as long as elections continue to be close in Michigan, elections will feel slow, even if they’re in fact faster than much of the country. Arizona is likely to be counting ballots for additional days, the result of a long ballot and several court orders. In California, officials are still tallying ballots and likely will be for weeks. In Oregon, ballots are accepted as late as a week after the election as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.
Michigan moves comparatively quickly, even among swing states, where the pressure to deliver timely results is higher. Speeding up the process any more under current standards could come at the expense of accuracy, Benson said Wednesday.
“We knew the immense scrutiny that this process was under, and I think everyone was very much on edge and just trying to make sure they did everything right as of course they did,” she said. “I think that contributed to some of the careful, slower actions, which we’d prefer over the speed … that leads to errors.”
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.