I rise to urge my colleagues to support this measure. We allowed for limited pre-processing of absentee ballots during the last even-year general election to help clerks be more efficient with the increased number of absentee ballots from no-reason absentee voting that was created by Proposal 3 in 2018. This process worked very well.
The legislation before us would remove the sunset to allow clerks to again use this tool to efficiently and securely process absentee ballots. This bill would also allow additional communities to participate and increase the time available for clerks to pre-process ballots to ready them for counting on Election Day. The bill also adds important election integrity measures important to the people of Michigan. This includes bipartisan legislation to allow county clerks to help remove deceased individuals from the voter rolls. It also improves security standards for absentee ballot drop boxes, including maintaining appropriate chain-of-custody for absentee ballots.
Finally, this bill contains a tie-bar to important bipartisan legislation that would help our brave men and women serving out of the country in our military to more easily vote while using existing technology to ensure security of their ballots. This bill maintains important safeguards for pre-processing, including requiring election inspectors from both parties and allowing for challengers to be present during this process.
I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting this bill.
Senator Moss’ statement is as follows:
It’s not every day that a liberal Democrat from metro Detroit champions Florida’s laws, but here we are. Back in 2020, recognizing the influx in absentee voting, Democrats here in Michigan introduced legislation to process these absentee ballots two weeks before Election Day, just to catch up further to states like Florida which allows for 22 days of processing these ballots ahead of the election. Michigan Republicans in 2020 instead went with only 24 hours of pre-processing, just enough time and scope to say they did something while also creating that space and scope for bad actors working in bad faith to wreak havoc as absentee ballots were reported late into the night.
Adding one more day here in Michigan is a step in the right direction, and I will vote for it. But I don’t want anybody here on Election Day this year to fill any voids with conspiracy theories when ballots are still being counted on Election Night because we did not give clerks the same lead time that election administrators have in Florida and Ohio and Kentucky and Arkansas and states all across the country. We could go much, much further.
The following bill was read a third time:
House Bill No. 6071, entitled
A bill to amend 1954 PA 116, entitled “Michigan election law,” by amending section 662 (MCL 168.662), as amended by 2004 PA 92.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: