DETROIT _ Roughly 500,000 absentee ballot applications were returned to the Michigan Bureau of Elections between May and August for reasons that included that the individuals had since died or moved, according to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's office.
Benson has been criticized for the May mailing to 7.7 million qualified voters in Michigan because some applications went to people who had long since moved or died.
But the Detroit Democrat has maintained in the months after the mailing that the returned applications would help to guide efforts to clean up the state's voter rolls of transient or dead individuals still on the state lists.
In a Thursday letter to state Republican state Sen. Ruth Johnson, of Holly, Benson said the Bureau of Elections will sort through the returned applications and distribute them to local clerks for voter list maintenance.
"We expect the majority of maintenance will take place after the Nov. 3 election, when federal law no longer limits such action," she said, referring to federal election law preventing list maintenance 90 days before an election.
The applications were returned for "any reason postal mail is returned to sender," including that the individual is dead or moved, said Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Benson's office.
The first-term secretary of state plans to mail postcards over the next week to 4.4 million registered active voters who have not yet requested an absentee ballot to remind them they have the opportunity to do so. She will also mail letters to 700,000 people who have a state driver's license or state ID but haven't registered to vote in Michigan and encourage them to register, the secretary said Wednesday.
Roughly 130,000 of those people will be automatically registered to vote unless they opt out within 30 days of receiving a postcard, Benson said in a statement. The individuals visited the Secretary of State's office for a driver's license or state ID transaction between December 2018 and September 2019, between the passage of automatic voter registration under Proposal 3 and its actual implementation.
In her letter to former Secretary of State Johnson and the Senate Elections Committee, Benson urged lawmakers to allow clerks to begin processing ballots early ahead of Nov. 3. She noted the decrease in election workers and increase in absentee ballots could mean worker fatigue and real delays in delivering election results.
Benson also asked the committee to consider legislation that would require clerks to call the voter if there were problems with an absentee ballot signature and accept ballots received after Election Day.
In the Aug. 4 primary, 2,225 absentee ballots were rejected because of missing or mismatched signatures and 6,405 ballots were rejected because they arrived after Election Day. The Aug. 4 primary included a record 2.5 million votes, 1.6 million of which were cast via absentee ballot.
Additionally, about 1,111 were rejected because the voter moved between when they filled out the ballot and Election Day; and 846 were not accepted because the voter died between filling out the ballot and Election Day, according to data from Benson's office.
"My office looks forward to supporting the committee with any data needed to advance the legislation outlined above," Benson wrote.
