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Hello, Michigan. Hayley here, reminding you that we’re only two and a half weeks from Election Day.
In Detroit, where I live, that means early in-person voting starts in just two days! The city is offering more than two weeks of early voting, which is the longest span of time in the state. You may remember that state law requires at least nine days since voters approved Proposal 2 back in 2022, but municipalities are allowed to start early voting as far back as 29 days before the election.
Two other communities starting early are Canton Township and East Lansing. Many clerks are encouraging people to vote early or absentee in no small part because that means fewer ballots to process on Election Day, which also means they can report results sooner. (I wrote about that back in August — clerks who are able to pre-process ballots really love it!)
It can be pretty expensive to run even nine days of early voting though, so it’s no surprise that many cities aren’t extending beyond that quite yet.
More than 857,000 ballots are already in, according to the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, which is nearly 12% of all active registered voters.
All that before people even have the chance to cast their ballots in person? It’s a sign this election is going to have a really high turnout, so stay tuned. You may be hearing from people who suggest that this election won’t have as high a turnout because that 12% is a lower absentee turnout rate than at this point in 2020. But keep in mind there was a brand new pandemic in 2020 that made people feel unsafe about going to the polls in person, and Proposal 2 expanded early voting in significant ways. Comparing 2020 to 2024 is, in Michigan anyway, a comparison of apples and aardvarks.
If you’re voting early, I’d love to hear about the experience. Let’s chat: hharding@votebeat.org.
New election data
In related news, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson held a news conference yesterday announcing the release of a new dashboard chock-full of election data. It’s cooler than it sounds, but it’s admittedly pretty limited in scope in its earliest iteration.
The dashboard, available through the SoS’s website, is the first fully public look at the numbers of voters of all sorts across the state. It allows people to sort by county or even municipality. It’s how I can tell you that, as of this morning, there are three communities in the state where every registered voter is on the permanent absentee ballot list! And how I can say with confidence that of the five communities with the most absentee ballots requested, three of them are in Wayne County. And that my hometown of Warren has already returned 9,900 absentee ballots!
The goal is to help fight potential misinformation by pulling numbers on returns daily from the Qualified Voter File.
“Understanding is one of the most important tools to fighting misinformation, and we’ve seen all the ways that data taken out of context can be used to distort the truth,” Benson said, adding that making an official source of information regularly available will help to “pre-bunk” — that is, get ahead of misinformation to avoid having to debunk it later — and build trust.
Michael Siegrist, Canton Township’s clerk who was also in attendance yesterday, said something that stood out to me: This dashboard can serve as an “independent diagnostic check” for anyone who wants to take a look. By offering this breadth of data, it allows people to understand where ballots are coming from and how those voters chose to cast their ballot.
The dashboard isn’t perfect. It seems to lack the ability to download data directly (which is a complaint I’ve had about past state dashboards, such as the infection tracker the state maintained during the first few years of COVID-19). It doesn’t allow you to break out information by demographics that may be helpful to better understand the data, such as age or race — although that probably makes sense, given that we have a right to a private ballot. And if the dashboard is intended for the general public, it would benefit from some clarification or definitions here and there to make it accessible to folks who aren’t immersed in elections year-round.
But I think it’s a wonderful start. I’m a huge data nerd, and I’m excited to spend some time with it as early voting gets underway. And those in charge of the dashboard say it will get updated, not just daily with new returns but with more data in new iterations down the line.
What I like most about it is that because it’s pulled from the Qualified Voter File updated by clerks each day, it’s timely and accurate. (That also makes it less hackable — it’s just data on where votes are coming from, Benson told reporters, rather than any information tied to a specific voter.) Plus, clerks don’t have to do anything more to share this information with interested parties, which is great given their already significant workload.
Fact check
This seems like as good a place as any to offer you a fact check I’ve seen floating around certain parts of the internet about returned ballots in Detroit. If you’re on Twitter/X, you may have seen this tweet from @EndWokeness.
A screenshot of @EndWokeness’s post taken Oct. 16.
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I’ve cropped the full image here to save space, but the graphic purports that Detroit has already seen 40% of all ballots returned. You may have seen the original or perhaps the response from billionaire, Trump-supporter, and overall I’m-just-asking-questions type Elon Musk, who said it was “weird.” Other users have said it’s a sign “they are stealing Michigan already.”
I would like to be very clear about this: Absolutely none of the users I mentioned in the paragraph above are correct.
Starting at the top: That graphic is extremely removed from context. I traced it back to user @umichvoter, who tweeted it about absentee ballots. As of the day of the initial tweet, more than 103,000 voters had requested absentee ballots in the city and more than 41,000 had returned them. That makes about 40%!
But that doesn’t mean that 40% of ALL ballots in Detroit have already been returned. We’ve certainly expanded early and absentee voting in recent years, but that would be a bananas number in a city that had about 517,000 registered voters as of August.
And to address Mr. Musk: No, it’s not weird. Cities all over Michigan are at about 40% returns of absentee ballots at this point in the election, because absentee ballots have been out for a few weeks. For example, Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum shared in a tweet Wednesday morning that seven of the 21 municipalities in her county were at a more than 40% return rate, as was the county overall.
Like with any data you might see out there, context is key. It’s always worth trying to find the original source. @EndWokeness clearly has a political agenda, while @umichvoter regularly shares polling data and interesting election tidbits from VoteHub, a platform that tracks that kind of thing.
It’s OK not to know everything about Michigan and our vast elections system. But there are good sources of data out there if you’re willing to look.
Between now and Election Day, I’ll have another one of these biweekly dispatches for you, and I’ll also be sending any Big Michigan Voting News to subscribers as well. If you know someone else who’d be interested in said voting news, encourage them to subscribe to this newsletter.