DETROIT – Voting issues have become one of the bitterest of the many things deeply dividing Democrats and Republicans these days. Many Republicans are convinced that dead people and illegal aliens are voting, and want tighter regulations on who votes and how.
Democrats think it is already too hard for most people to vote – and want to make it easier, partly by barring anything that might tend to discourage people from voting, which they call voter repression, and partly by making the process easier, including adding early voting days, as is the case in 33 states, including Ohio and Indiana.
Each side is trying to significantly change the way Michigan elections are held this year through petition drives. At this point, it isn’t clear if anyone will succeed – though Republicans may have a better chance. Here’s how things stand:
- Michigan citizens have various ways of enacting a law without the legislature. They can put a proposed new law on the ballot if they collect 340,047 valid signatures, and that’s the route conservatives went.
Their proposal, called Secure MI Vote, would require a voter ID for both voting and absentee ballot applications. (Currently, voters without ID can sign an affidavit instead.) It would prevent the Secretary of State from mailing unsolicited absentee ballot applications, as was done in 2020, during the pandemic.
It would also, among other things, bar outside funding to improve elections in Michigan, restrict voting by mail and require partial Social Security number for voter registration.
- Democrats and their allies, a group called Promote the Vote 2022 are attempting to get a state constitutional amendment on the Nov. 8 ballot that would make voting easier – and contradicts virtually everything the Secure MI bill would do.
Among other things, it would provide nine early voting days, allow public sources to fund elections, allow voters to register to have absentee ballots sent to them every election, and require one ballot drop box for every 15,000 voters. It would also prevent anyone except government officials from auditing votes, and mandate that only official vote totals could be used to certify results.
So which attempt is most likely to succeed?
Getting a constitutional amendment on the ballot is harder – 425,059 signatures are needed, a figure, by the way, that represents 10 percent of the vote cast for governor in the last election. In reality, because some signatures are always invalid, organizers really need at least half a million. They have till July 11 to submit them.
They do, however, have some money behind them — more than $2.5 million, including $125,000 from Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood director.
For those backing Secure MI Vote, the bad news is that they missed the June 1 deadline to turn in signatures to get on the ballot.
However, they can still keep collecting them, and if they get enough, resubmit them late. All the signatures have to be collected within a 180 day period, so if they were to turn them in today, for example, any they collected before Christmas would be thrown out.
Election authorities would attempt to verify their signatures after they dealt with all those that made the deadline. Depending how long that took, Secure MI might still make the ballot …
But now for the shocker: Those behind it don’t really want it on the ballot at all! Under a strange quirk in Michigan law, if they have enough signatures, the legislature can then enact it into law, and with Republicans in firm control, they certainly would.
And the governor in that case would have no power to veto it, as she does with any other law the legislature passes.
If that happens, Democrats’ only hope is that Promote the Vote gets their amendment on the ballot, and it passes. As a constitutional amendment, it would trump any law at odds with it.
The voters would have to decide.
Ironically, while the Secure MI proposal evolved partly out of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, for decades, Michigan has been widely recognized for having remarkably clean and secure elections. Both parties long recognized this.
Recounts have been few, and barely changed anything. Republicans insisted on a massive recount in the governor’s race in 1950, when the Democratic incumbent prevailed by just 1,154 votes.
Nothing changed. Similarly, Dianne Byrum, a Democrat candidate for Congress who lost by barely 100 votes in 2000, asked for a recount — then, down only 88 votes, abandoned the recount before it was over.
Nor has there been any sign of illegal voting on any significant scale. Some years ago, when some politicians began to make noises about illegal voting, a Republican secretary of state did an audit of more than a million votes that had been cast in one recent election.
She did find four non-citizens who had registered to vote – but it turned out this was largely her office’s fault; they qualified for drivers’ licenses, and the policy was to routinely ask people if they wanted to register to vote at the same time.
Some, not knowing better, had done so.
However, in politics these days, the irrational sometimes triumphs. But having covered Michigan politics for nearly half a century, I feel confident I know what the chances are that the 2020 election was somehow stolen for President Biden, who carried Michigan by a healthy 154,188 votes.
None whatsoever.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
