Voting rights proponents in Michigan submitted petitions to guarantee at least nine days of early voting, expand the use of ballot drop boxes and ensure people who forget to bring their ID to the polls can vote.
The move comes four years after Michigan voters approved a measure by a 2-1 margin that allows people to register to vote anytime and makes no-excuse absentee voting available.
The provision on early voting would change how voting is conducted in Michigan. Now, voters can go to election clerks’ offices before Election Day to ask for and submit absentee ballots, but the times for voting vary by jurisdiction, and the ballots are not opened and fed into voting machines until Election Day. Under the proposal, all communities would offer nine days of early voting, and voters would feed their ballots directly into voting machines.
Under the proposal, only election officials could audit the vote. That would prevent election reviews like the one in Arizona, where dozens of workers for a company hired by Republicans examined ballots with microscope cameras.The Michigan proposal would also require election officials to certify results based only on election returns.
“Given where our politics are with a split legislature and governor, it’s hard to get anything moving, frankly, so sometimes voters need to take it in their own hands,” Spencer said in an interview.To get on the ballot, organizers had to submit at least 425,000 signatures — 10 percent of the total number of ballots cast in the 2018 election for governor.
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