LANSING, Mich. — Michigan polling places opened at 7 a.m. Tuesday with close to a third of the electorate already done voting, according to the Michigan Department of State.
More than 2.3 million ballots were in before Tuesday, which works out to 31.2% of the 7.42 million Michiganders on the active voter rolls. Early in-person voting drew 743,450 people over the nine-day window that ended Sunday, with Sunday itself the busiest day at 114,420 ballots. As of Monday morning, clerks had received 1,569,715 absentee ballots out of 2,174,646 requested, and 2,023,195 voters are on the permanent mail ballot list.
Polls stay open until 8 p.m. local time, and anyone in line at closing can still vote. Absentee ballots, apart from those from military and overseas voters, have to reach a clerk’s office or an official drop box by 8 p.m. to count, and state officials are telling voters not to put them in the mail at this point. Unregistered residents can still sign up in person on Tuesday by bringing proof of residency to the local clerk, then cast a ballot on the spot.
Every Michigan ballot carries two statewide questions near the bottom. Proposal 1 asks whether the state should call a constitutional convention, a question the Michigan Constitution requires be put to voters every 16 years. A yes vote would lead to the election of delegates who could draft revisions, which voters would then have to approve before anything changed. A no vote leaves the 1963 constitution, the state’s fourth, in place.
Proposal 2 would rewrite state campaign finance law rather than the constitution. It would stop gas and electric utilities that answer to state regulators, along with the people who own and run them, from giving to candidates for governor, attorney general and the Legislature, to party committees and to the commissioners who set utility rates. A business holding over $250,000 in annual government contract work could not donate to candidates in the government that awarded the work, a piece that would kick in 18 months after the rest. The measure also requires any group putting at least $5,000 into ads that name a candidate to report it within 10 days when the ads run shortly before an election, paid-for-by labels on online political ads and disclosure on robocalls made with artificial intelligence. It needs a simple majority, and backers gathered more than half a million signatures to qualify it.
State election officials warn that full unofficial results may take time after polls close, since mail ballots arriving Tuesday must clear signature checks before they are counted, and they point voters to county clerk websites for returns. Polling place lookups and sample ballots are at mi.gov/vote.
Section: More Lansing MI politics news
Filed under: Lansing MI Politics News
