Michigan ballots tangled in mail delays in advance of Tuesday primary

The difficulties in Michigan — one of five states holding primaries Tuesday and a crucial presidential battleground for the fall — offer a potential warning ahead of the general election, when millions more voters than in past years are expected to vote absentee to avoid possible exposure to the novel coronavirus at in-person polling locations.

At least 77 percent of American voters will be able to vote through the mail in the fall, according to a Washington Post tracker of state rules.

Recent policy changes at the Postal Service put in place by the new postmaster general, a top donor to President Trump, have caused days-long backlogs of mail, according to postal employees and union officials, heightening fears that absentee ballots will not be delivered in time to be counted.

The Postal Service has said the changes are aimed at stabilizing the agency after decades of financial woes and are not meant to slow the delivery of ballots or any other mail.

But Trump has spent the past several months lambasting the practice of voting by mail with rhetoric that now appears to be turning GOP voters away from absentee ballots. He has recently intensified his attacks on the Postal Service, telling reporters on Monday that it has been mismanaged and does not have the capacity to handle a flood of absentee ballots.

“The post office, for many, many years, has been run in a fashion that hasn’t been great,” Trump said during a White House news briefing. “Great workers and everything, but they have old equipment, very old equipment, and I don’t think the post office is prepared for a thing like this. You have to ask the people at the post office, but how can the post office be expected to handle [this]?”

Michigan, like many other states, saw voters turn in large numbers to mail voting for the primary this year. As on Monday, about 2,066,000 absentee ballots had been sent to voters, compared with about 575,000 at the same point in Aug. 2016.

With one day left before the primary, Michigan voters had already returned roughly 1.28 million absentee ballots, breaking the state’s previous record of 1.27 million absentee ballots cast in the November 2016 general election, according to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Requests for absentee ballots have risen sharply around the country, including in Arizona, Kansas and Missouri, which also were holding primaries on Tuesday. Voters also cast ballots in Washington state, which has held universal mail elections for nearly a decade.

In Detroit, where Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) faces challenger Brenda Jones on Tuesday, approximately 90,000 absentee ballots had been issued and 58,000 had been returned as of Saturday, according to the city clerk.

In the city’s New Center neighborhood, traffic cones were lined up along the street in front of the elections office Monday to allow voters to submit their ballots from their cars for the first time. Several voters asked for absentee ballots, saying they had not received theirs in the mail.

Sitting in the back seat of a sedan with a cane leaning against his leg, Larry Morrison said that as a senior with a disability, he has been voting absentee for years. But the 73-year-old said that until this year, he had never encountered problems receiving the ballot in the mail: “No, no, we always get it right on the money.”

While his disability allowed him to wait in the car for an election official, Morrison said he would walk into the office to cast a ballot in person if necessary.

“[I’d be] a little nervous, yeah, but I would do it anyway if I had to,” he said. “Because that’s our voting right.”

Morrison and Josephine Williams, 72, expressed concerns that political leaders might use problems with absentee voting to challenge the results of the election in November.

“I think when they do the presidential [election] it’s really going to be a problem,” said Williams, who lives across the street from Morrison on Detroit’s west side.

Another voter, Donald Williams, 63, said he also did not receive his ballot in the mail despite submitting an application in June.

“I think the city is doing a great job” despite the mail delays, Williams said. “It’s just now that if people really want to vote, we’re going to have to put forth that extra effort to do so. You know, I wouldn’t let this stop me from getting my vote in.”

Ruble reported from Detroit. Amy Gardner and Michelle Ye Hee Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Source:WP