Early voting in the Michigan primary is underway, about 700K have cast ballots

A voting sign in East Lansing, Feb. 24, 2024 | Susan J. Demas

In the first three days of early voting, around 700,000 ballots have been cast in Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at a Monday news conference in Detroit.

Voters approved several changes to Michigan’s election process in 2022, including nine days of in-person early voting before elections, with the state’s primary election on the horizon on Aug. 6.

This is a significant election cycle, Benson said, one where the eyes of the nation are on Michigan, just as they were during the 2020 presidential election.

“Our citizens are very likely to cast votes in this cycle that will determine the next president of the United States,” Benson said. “We have just wrapped up the first weekend of early voting for that August primary. And notably, it is the first significant statewide election in which we are seeing early voting play out.”

On Saturday, about 6,400 individuals cast their ballot at early voting sites across the state. On Sunday, about 4,200 did the same, Benson said. More than 1.6 million Michigan citizens have requested an absentee ballot for the primary and almost 700,000 already submitted those ballots.

However, the first day of early voting was marked with disruption. The Department of State reported that a server issue temporarily impeded clerks’ ability to perform early voting . The state of Michigan’s server had a number of applications running at the same time and the overload slowed down the voting electronic poll book, Benson said.

She said she’s confident it won’t happen again. Benson touted how quickly election officials navigated the problem and implemented backup procedures.

“It sort of underscores … one of the assets of early voting is that it enables us to catch something like that on a Saturday when you still have 8.5, 8.75 days of early voting to go and then fix and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Benson said.

Things can go wrong, which is why early voting helps keep elections intact, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said at the news conference.

When the Crowdstrike computer outage occurred earlier in July, it wasn’t just flights that were impacted, Becker said. States that had started early voting were impacted, with Arizona being one of them .

With early voting, states aren’t left with the entirety of the election process in one day, Becker said. Ultimately, the delays caused by the Crowdstrike outage won’t impact the election due to the grace period of early voting.

“It allows voters to spread out their activity over a series of days and multiple methods of casting a ballot. It allows election officials to spread that activity out, as well, over a series of days, so that you’re not concentrating all of that voting into a 12 or 14 hour period on a single Tuesday in November,” Becker said.

And in terms of security, spreading the election process prevents singular events from having a mass impact on elections, Becker said, whether it be traffic, weather, power outages or intentional attacks on democracy.

Benson added that in this period of U.S. history where the political divide runs deep, comments made by candidates for office and elected officials refusing to accept the outcome of the 2024 election are dangerous.

“It makes me concerned that in this era of political violence that we are clearly in, that comments such as that casting wrongly, in my view, aspersions on the election process themselves can lead to potentially violence, not just against candidates, but election officials and election administrators,” Benson said.

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