LANSING, Mich. — The state Senate on Wednesday approved a wide-ranging overhaul of the ways ballots are cast in Michigan, carrying out a constitutional amendment that voters put in place in November.
Senators voted 22-16 in favor of the main proposal in an eight-bill package, which would require at least nine days of early voting across Michigan and allow clerks to work together to provide sites where ballots could be filled out and fed into tabulators before Election Day.
Traditionally, Michigan voters have had to cast ballots in person on Election Day in their precincts or turn in absentee ballots that weren't tallied until Election Day. The new legislation's lead sponsor, state Sen. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, labeled it a "generational change in voting" that would "uplift voting rights."
Municipal clerks, who administer elections in Michigan, need guidance for implementing the new constitutional amendment, and the bills provided it, Moss said.
The ballot proposal to put the new voting processes in the Michigan Constitution passed with 60% support in November. Lawmakers, clerks, voting rights groups and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's office have worked on bills to implement the changes over the past five months.
The bills that passed the Senate Wednesday largely reflected the policies in the amendment, which required at least nine days of early voting and the opportunity for clerks to offer additional days if they chose to.
"These bills are, by extension, the will of more than 60% of Michigan voters — approximately 2.5 million Michiganders — in 2022," Moss said Wednesday. "They dramatically improve access to voting, and we will keep building on this effort in the weeks and months ahead."
The amendment also provided a right to prepaid postage for mailing absentee ballots and a right to vote through an absentee ballot drop box. The bills would require each city or township to install a drop box and mandate that a city or township has one drop box per 15,000 registered voters.
Under the bills, clerks could begin providing early voting within 29 days of an election, meaning there could be different windows of early voting in jurisdictions across the state.
Republicans, including state Sen. Ruth Johnson, R-Holly, have criticized the idea one city offering more than 20 days of early voting while another offered only nine, saying such differences represented unequal access.
Johnson, who served as Michigan's secretary of state from 2011 through 2018, said the new bills would weaken election integrity.
"The bills ... allow the secretary of state to wield unprecedented power to set procedures for early voting without going through the formal rule-making process, which allows for the public to have input and oversight by the people's elected representatives in the Legislature," Johnson said during a committee hearing Tuesday.
The bills would give Benson's office the power to "supervise the implementation and conduct of early voting."
GOP lawmakers had criticized the bills for not including a requirement that new ballot drop boxes be monitored by video cameras. But Senate Democrats adopted an amendment from Johnson to say clerks must "ensure effective monitoring."
Sens. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, and Mark Huizenga, R-Walker, joined the Senate's 20 Democrats in support of the main early voting bill. Most of the other bills, which were less controversial, passed by wider margins.
McBroom, who wrote a 2021 Senate report that investigated false and unproven claims of fraud in the 2020 election, said it was "vital" that lawmakers put bills in place to implement the constitutional amendment. McBroom noted, however, that he didn't agree with everything in the early voting package.
In recent days, the Democratic-controlled Senate and House have been advancing identical election bills in Lansing. Next week, each chamber will likely consider the other's package before deciding which proposals to send to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's desk for final approval.
Lawmakers have said they hope to get the bills to Whitmer by the end of the month because clerks will have to implement early voting for the Feb. 27 presidential primary. Some clerks, like Delta Township's Mary Clark in Eaton County, also want to pilot early voting in municipal elections this November.
"We are eager, obviously, for this whole new world to be able to be piloted this fall," Clark said last week.
Under the bills, clerks have three options for how to implement early voting and administer early voting sites.
They can develop a strategy focused on just their municipality, they can reach an agreement with another municipality or they can become part of a countywide strategy. Moss has said the legislation meets the needs of "diverse communities" in Michigan.
For the countywide approach, each early voting site could serve voters in specific municipalities, voters in one municipality or any combination, as long as each voter in the county was served by one or more early voting sites, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Senate Fiscal Agency.
Some voters will likely have to cast ballots at early voting sites outside their own jurisdiction.
Vanessa Guerra, the Saginaw County clerk and a former state lawmaker, has said her county's plan is to have one county voting center, located at the center of the county. There would be four tabulators, with two serving voters from Saginaw Township and the city of Saginaw and two for the remaining municipalities.
The House and Senate could also vote in the coming days on another bill that would allow clerks to process absentee ballots and place them in tabulators before Election Day.
In the past, clerks had been required to open and tabulate absentee ballots on Election Day only. But a constitutional amendment in 2018 allowed for no-reason absentee voting and greatly expanded the number of absentee ballots, causing delays in totaling results.
Before the 2020 election, the Legislature, which was then controlled by Republicans, granted clerks in large cities only one day of extra time to begin preprocessing absentee ballots, meaning they could prepare the ballots for counting but not place them in tabulators.
State Sen. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, said the legislation would create "generational change in voting" and would "uplift voting rights."
Because of the lack of early processing time in 2020 and a record 3.3 million absentee votes cast in Michigan, the state's ballots weren't fully tabulated until more than a day after polls closed.
"I own this," then-Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a Republican, said after the delays in 2020. "I am not shying away from it."
On Tuesday, Moss introduced a bill to allow cities and townships with at least 5,000 residents to process and tabulate absentee ballots on the eight days before Election Day. The proposal would also enable voters to bring their absentee ballots to a polling place on Election Day or an early voting site and "personally" place their ballot into a tabulator.
Election results can't be generated, printed or reported before 8 p.m. on Election Day under the bill.
Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, D-East Lansing, has said she will introduce an identical proposal in the state House on Tuesday.
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