Michigan election officials expect to have unofficial results for the presidential election ready by midday Wednesday.
Over 40% of active Michigan voters have already cast a ballot, many doing so via absentee ballots, which are slower to count than ballots cast in person.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said many clerks across the state have already begun pre-processing those mail-in votes.
This is the first presidential election in which that option is available for clerks. It allows them to take many of the steps that are necessary to prepare a ballot to be counted before Election Day. Benson said that should speed up how long it takes to count them compared to 2020, because fewer ballots will be unprocessed before Election Day.
“We'll have a much smaller number of those ballots this time and much higher capacity to efficiently and securely and accurately process and tabulate those ballots tomorrow,” Benson told reporters Monday afternoon.
The earliest voting data won’t start coming out until 9 p.m. Eastern time, after all precincts in the state have closed.
Setting clear expectations on when election results could come is an effort to increase confidence in the process and cut back on misinformation, SOURCE said.
In the 2020 race, lies spread that the presidential election was stolen despite several audits confirming the outcome and no valid evidence of widespread fraud being offered.
The consequences of that effort are still playing out in court, and Michigan elections officials have already been sued this election cycle.
Benson, a Democrat, said most of the suits have been “truly meritless.”
“So we're trying to help everyone see that these are, as we've said consistently, oftentimes ... a PR strategy that are masquerading as lawsuits to try to create fear or cast aspersions or seeds of doubt on the integrity of our elections,” Benson said.
Benson also said her office is prepared to prevent another issue seen in 2020: poll workers feeling intimidated and harassed during voting and ballot counting.
She said, this year, election challengers and observers have been relatively well behaved throughout early voting. And it's now a specific crime to threaten or harass a poll worker in Michigan.
“I certainly expect and hope that no one will try to disrupt the process. It won’t be successful. It will break the law. And we will be there with state, local and, in some cases, federal law enforcement to protect the process, to protect the people in the process and to ensure that there is justice served,” Benson said.
