I was an election worker in a Wayne county precinct and serve as the voter education director for a local non-partisan, non-profit voters' rights organization. I've had multiple conversations this year with two local municipal clerks, a representative from the MI Secretary of State, and a representative from the MI ACLU about absentee voting and election day poll processes. What would you like to know about how the election process works here?
I do have a question. I made a comment recently that in Ohio there had to be bipartisan presence at the polls to prevent vote tampering. I assume that is also present during absentee ballot counting. You said the same thing happens to Michigan "to the best of their ability". I found this article https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/gop-calls-michigan-election-probe-officials-say-their-claims-are-weak which shows that there was more "irregularities" than I originally thought. So my question is I understand that Detroit is primarily a democratic area. Does that mean that they have trouble getting republican poll workers? Was there equal representation of Republicans to Democrats at the polls and when counting absentee ballots. Were the Republicans trying to "barge their way in, harass and poll watch" trained at all (the article said "improperly" trained.) Would there presence there make them outnumber the Dems or "even" the representation?
It would be helpful to cite articles that are not almost 2 weeks old, as the "irregularities" have been addressed in court and dismissed as not supported by actual evidence by this point. The ones cited in the article involved human errors in both heavily Democrat and heavily Republican areas of the state and have been addressed in the local auditing and certification processes. As noted in this week's articles, these types of errors are generally clerical, occur in every election, affect relatively small numbers of ballots (or are even simply data reporting errors), and are handled through normal channels. Obviously there would be more absentee ballot-related issues this year, given the trifecta of 1) the first election under new state laws regarding absentee ballot access, 2) a pandemic, and 3) a party leader who convinced many of his followers that absentee ballots were all prone to fraud (despite voting absentee himself). None of this is surprising, especially given the push from one side to declare the election fraudulent before it even happened.
Here in Michigan, each precinct is required to have at least one GOP and one Dem poll worker. Those workers have to be onsite during poll opening and closing procedures. This can be challenging in heavily Dem areas, and in fact at least one local clerk was specifically advertising for GOP workers last month (and was ultimately able to meet the requirement). There was a statewide initiative to hire election workers to improve the election process in the city of Detroit. Because many outstate areas (and indeed, many areas of Wayne County) are strongly GOP, balancing the precinct workers on election day does not seem to have been a problem.
In Detroit, the absentee votes were processed at the TCF conference center downtown because it was large enough to allow the ballot processing teams to spread out, given the state pandemic regulations. These regulations did cap the number of people in the room, but the regulations required at least one GOP and one Dem election challenger at each counting team table at all times. Things only started to get hairy when it became evident that the absentee ballots were tilting in favor of Biden (as expected, and in fact Trump did slightly better than he had in 2016), and a crowd of Trump supporters began trying to storm the counting facility.
Both parties are expected to train and register their election challengers, and that appeared to have been done at least for those workers who were present early in the process. Poll watchers are less subject to regulations but are also not legally allowed to interfere with the election process. I cannot comment on the training or status of the Trump supporters who tried to storm the facility.
Topic: Trump outrage of the day (Read 837750 times)
