(WXMI) — Monday was day three of early in-person voting in Michigan, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says the process has gone smoothly thus far.
Michiganders were able to vote early starting Saturday. Benson said more than 10,600 people took part as of Sunday night. That’s in addition to the more than 700,000 absentee ballots that have been submitted.
This election is only the second in which early in-person voting was permitted in the state. Michiganders voted in favor of amending the state constitution in 2022 to require at least nine days of early voting in elections.
Election security expert David Becker says having more voting options lessens the risk for problems, and it contributes to less scrambling for election workers.
Concentrating all voting into a single 12- or 14-hour period on a single Tuesday creates a single point of potential failure for a lot of things to happen,” says Becker. “It could be some kind of intentional attack on the system, a cyber event or something else. Or it could be some kind of malfunction of technology we just saw in the last few weeks, the CrowdStrike incident, which affected systems nationwide.”
Secretary Benson says no major problems occurred this weekend.
“Under these new procedures, 165 jurisdictions are able to begin preprocessing and tabulating those ballots now, the week before Election Day.”
We’re told there was an error the affected election workers from connecting to the state’s server but that was resolved quickly. Benson assured us clerks were still able to issue ballots and maintain security of voting records.
Early voting runs through Sunday, Aug. 4.
The state primary is Aug. 6.
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