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Early voting will wrap up on Sunday for Michigan’s presidential primary. During the first three days of the new voting option available in the state, there were more than 18,000 people cast ballots in person at early voting centers. 499 of those in the first weekend were voters living in the Upper Peninsula.
“First of all, we had no expectations. It’s our first one. I figured with the presidential primary usually being a low-voting election. And this being our first early voting center I wasn’t thinking we would see very high numbers.” – Jen Kelly, County Clerk, Houghton County
Marquette County had the most in-person early voters for the first three days with 112 for the Upper Peninsula. Houghton County had one of the lowest in-person early voting turnouts in that period with 14 voters. About half of the Upper Peninsula average of 33 voters per county during that time. An average early voter count per county across the state in the first three days averaged 220 ballots cast.
“Well, I think we’re seeing what everybody, from a lot of the clerks and people I’ve spoken to, were thinking. The early voting center is not beneficial too, in big numbers, to the Upper Peninsula. I think where the big numbers are coming are from our major cities downstate.” – Jen Kelly, County Clerk, Houghton County
Funding for the early voting centers in Michigan will come from the state for the first year. Kelly says that she requested 150,000 dollars from the state to run Houghton’s early voting center during the February, August, and November dates. But after this year the burden will fall onto municipalities and counties to source funding for the nine days.
“For everything I did it was pretty close to $150,000. That was to get us up and running, and hopefully have enough money for the workers. I didn’t put in food. That’s going to be separate for the three elections. Anything that then isn’t covered I will have to bill the municipalities and ask them to reimburse the county. And what the state has said on that is, it was a one-time deal. So from there on out it will be on the cities and townships of Houghton County. And the whole state you might as well say. So we’ll go off of how many precincts cities and townships have. And then split the cost accordingly.” – Jen Kelly, County Clerk, Houghton County
Early voting in Michigan will end on Sunday two days before the primary. After precincts close at 8 pm on Tuesday, Kelly says that clerks will then begin running the tabulators before bringing the ballots to the county courthouse. At that point, she will have to manually upload each card for every tabulator. Previously clerks were able to use a Virtual Private Network to electronically verify results.
Read about the first three days early voting centers have been available in Michigan here.
Find your precinct here.
