MI Senate Gives Election Officials Extra Day To Count Absentee...

Yesterday the Michigan Senate passed a bill 34-2 to give election officials in communities with at least 25,000 residents an extra day to process absentee ballots. The election officials in those communities will be able to begin processing their absentee ballots one day before the election on November 2nd.

The bill calls for the law to sunset immediately making it a one-time event for these communities.

The election clerks said this bill is needed due to the more than 2.1 million absentee ballots that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has stated have already been requested for the November election. As a point of reference, approximately 1.6 million absentee ballots were received and counted by Michigan clerks in Michigan’s August primary election.

The bill, SB757 will in part require a report to determine how many municipalities participate in pre-processing absentee ballots.

In a letter signed by seventeen clerks across the state of Michigan that asked for a week before the election to process absentee ballots. In that letter they stated:

“While even one day of pre-processing before Election Day would provide some help, many clerks are busy preparing for the logistics of the next day’s in-person voting...We believe that allowing clerks to have seven days of pre-processing before Election Day is the wisest policy and would give overwhelmed jurisdictions the ability to conduct the election in the (safest) and secure manner possible. Fortunately, bipartisan legislation to give clerks more time stands ready for you to move in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.”

If this extra day will assure that these clerks and their staff can assure all of us that every vote was a legal vote and the vote was actually cast by the registered voter and not some else who was ballot harvesting, then this bill was needed. Ballot harvesting refers to the practice of allowing party volunteers or campaign workers to collect mail-in ballots from voters and submitting them in batches to polling places or election offices. In Michigan, we have additional laws that mandate that the collector is a verified relative, legal guardian or someone who lives in the home. How exactly do they verify that the person who is dropping off the ballots is a relative or legal guardian I do not know?

Mail-in voting in states that do not have the necessary processes in place is rife for illegal votes. We should all be very suspicious of the millions of taxpayer dollars that Whitmer is spending to push a massive mail-in vote, as I have said before we all go to grocery stores weekly why do you think you cannot vote in person.

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