Absentee ballot drop boxes, envelopes big problem for Detroit, advocates say

In November, Detroit voters are expected to cast absentee ballots in droves, but some voting advocates worry that the city hasn't done enough to get ready for the onslaught.

Unlike most jurisdictions in Michigan that have been using new envelopes to mail absentee ballots — redesigned by the state to help the U.S. Postal Service easily identify and swiftly process them — Detroit has been using an older version. In addition, advocates, already concerned about the small number of ballot drop boxes around the city for the August primary, want to see more added for November's election, but it is not clear how many more Detroit plans. 

For the primary, Detroit had two drop-off boxes for more than 480,000 registered voters.

“It was not anywhere near enough,” said Aghogho Edevbie, the Michigan director for All Voting is Local, a national voting rights advocacy group.

The city set up seven satellite centers where Detroiters could vote absentee during certain hours ahead of the August primary. But unlike the satellite centers, the drop-off boxes “provide convenient, 24-hour access to voting,” said Brian Steinberg who heads the nonpartisan Michigan Election Reform Alliance’s drop box project to expand the number of boxes in large jurisdictions across the state.

More: What we know about Detroit’s absentee ballot processing errors

Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey declined to be interviewed, but her office said Winfrey did not want to change the envelopes the city uses for absentee ballots in a presidential election year to avoid confusion for voters and postal workers. And while some reports note the city plans to add more ballot drop boxes for the November general election, the deputy director of the Detroit Department of Elections, Gina Avery, did not respond to multiple email requests seeking details.

The city has not sought funding available from Wayne County, and the state Bureau of Elections says it is not aware of any reimbursement request from Detroit to cover the costs of purchasing additional drop boxes.

These concerns come on top of problems with processing absentee ballots in Detroit identified by the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. For the majority of Detroit precincts in the August primary, the number of absentee ballots counted did not match the number recorded in the poll book, leading the Michigan Board of Canvassers to push for a state takeover of Detroit's elections during a meeting this week.

Detroit not using redesigned envelopes 

Unlike the brown envelopes used in Detroit, the newly designed envelopes have a white background and different colors for absentee ballots being sent to voters and those being returned to local clerks’ offices.

“I think it’s a design that’s working,” said Lansing City Clerk Chris Swope, who serves as president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks and sits on the Michigan Bureau of Elections’ Forms Committee. “It’s just really easily recognizable and pretty different than most other mail.”

The design helps postal employees easily identify absentee ballots and prevents completed ballots from being sent back to voters instead of the clerk’s office.

With the old design, “occasionally a voter would call and say it got delivered back to them instead of us, so one of the benefits of the color coding was for the post office to become familiar with which way the ballots were going,” said Ann Arbor Clerk Jacqueline Beaudry, who began using the new envelopes in 2019.

The new envelopes also highlight where voters must include their signature, helping ensure voters’ absentee ballots won’t be thrown away because they forgot to sign the envelope.

The envelopes were the product of the Michigan Bureau of Elections’ Forms Committee, which is made up of clerks and bureau staff. The committee consulted with national experts in 2019 to redesign the envelopes. Ahead of the August primary, the Bureau of Elections offered to cover the costs of purchasing envelopes for up to 40% of a jurisdiction's registered voters. Detroit's turnout in the August primary was roughly 25%, so funding from the state could have entirely covered the costs of using the new envelopes. For November's election, the bureau will cover envelope costs for up to 60% of a jurisdiction's registered voters.  

Swope said his office first used the new envelopes in 2019, during a local election. His office initially used both the old and new ones. “When we did have that overlap, we did clearly observe there was a difference between the rate of people forgetting to sign the envelope between the old and the new,” Swope said.

Detroit rejected 409 absentee ballots because they lacked a signature and 942 because they arrived late in the mail, more than any other jurisdiction in the state that had to reject ballots for these two reasons. 

While the new envelopes help postal workers identify and process mail-in ballots, the Secretary of State’s Office recently received a letter from the Postal Service warning that the state’s deadlines for voters to request an absentee ballot by mail and to return their mail-in ballot are incompatible with the agency's delivery schedules.

In Michigan, voters’ requests to have an absentee ballot mailed to them must be made to their clerks by 5 p.m. the Friday before the election. This tight timeline does not guarantee delivery of ballots by Election Day. 

That is why many jurisdictions in the state have installed drop boxes in an election year that has already seen a record number of absentee voters and will likely see even more in November's election.

Only two drop-off boxes for primary

The push for drop-off boxes has been accelerated by reports about slowdowns in mail delivery in light of cost-cutting measures at the Postal Service pursued by the Trump administration. Last Tuesday, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced he would reauthorize overtime and halt the removal of mail-sorting equipment blamed for slowing down mail delivery. But a ban on extra mail trips will remain in place and DeJoy said he will not restore sorting machines that have been removed.

The drop boxes offer a way for voters to avoid postal delivery altogether. A recent analysis of last quarter's Postal Service performance data by the nonprofit newsroom Wisconsin Watch and APM Reports, a national investigative news organization, found that Detroit's postal district reported the second worst on-time scores in the nation between April 1 and June 30 this year.

But Detroit was among just a handful of jurisdictions representing 5 million voters surveyed by the Michigan Election Reform Alliance in late spring that did not have any drop boxes. Ahead of the August primary, the city ended up installing two boxes — one outside the Department of Elections and another outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center. 

While the city plans to add additional ballot drop boxes for the November general election, it has not sought funding available from Wayne County. The Michigan Bureau of Elections also has set aside $1 million to help jurisdictions purchase ballot drop boxes but is not aware of any requests for reimbursement from Detroit for the absentee ballot drop boxes the city plans to add.

Edevbie believes the drop boxes will help facilitate absentee voting this fall and keep voters safe. Voters “should not feel they have to play Russian roulette with their health or their vote this November,” he said.

The U.S. Elections Assistance Commission recommends a standard of one drop box for every 15,000 to 20,000 registered voters. As of the August primary, there were 485,821 registered voters in Detroit, so the city needs between 24 and 32 drop boxes to meet this standard.

Cities across the U.S. are looking to ballot drop boxes as a way to support absentee voting in November. Milwaukee plans to have 15 drop boxes available for its roughly 300,000 voters, or one drop box for every 20,000 voters, according to Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the city's Election Commission. Chicago will have, at a minimum, 50 drop boxes, said Chicago Election Board Executive Director Lance Gough.

Few election jurisdictions in Michigan had enough absentee ballot drop boxes during the August primary. Flint, Grand Rapids and Lansing had only one or two. But Clinton Township, with nearly 80,000 registered voters, had five absentee ballot drop boxes and Sterling Heights, with roughly 91,500 registered voters, had seven, the most of any election jurisdiction in the state. Both jurisdictions meet the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission standard. 

“We decided that the easiest option or the best option for our voters was to install drop boxes that are guaranteed to be emptied every day,” said Sterling Heights Clerk Melanie Ryska.

Increasing the number of absentee drop boxes in Detroit is particularly important, advocates say. A third of Detroiters do not own a car. "They don't have to have a car to travel to a drop box to vote if the city provides enough in close proximity to make them available to vote conveniently and safely," Steinberg said.

Aghogho suspects Detroit might see a smaller share of voters submitting absentee ballots compared with other jurisdictions if the city does not install enough drop boxes or educate voters on where and how to use them.

"One of the reasons why Detroit might not match the absentee ballot level of requests is that there has to be confidence that the vote is going to get there, and drop boxes increase that confidence level," he said.

In July, Wayne County commissioners appropriated $100,000 in federal coronavirus relief funds to cover the costs of purchasing ballot drop boxes for election jurisdictions in the county.

“I originally looked at this as an issue because other communities had drop boxes and Detroit didn’t,” said Wayne County Commissioner Monique Baker McCormick, who represents a northwest Detroit district and introduced the resolution establishing the grant program before Detroit installed its two drop boxes. 

“I felt that Detroiters were being disenfranchised,” Baker McCormick said.

While 26 of the county’s 43 clerks have ordered additional drop boxes through the program, Detroit has not requested any of the available funds. To have the boxes installed in time, "we need to order the boxes right away,” said Baker McCormick. The drop boxes cost $2,000 and there is still $48,000 available in funding from the county for any community that wants it.

"I would think that any municipality, if they were offered something like that, they should take advantage of it. There’s no additional expense, it’s already paid for. All you have to do is ask for it,” said Rhonda Craig, president of the League of Women Voters of Detroit.

More:Michigan clerks: What we need to count absentee ballots in November

More:Michigan SOS Benson to mail millions of postcards to encourage absentee voting

What Detroit should do before November?

Craig would like to see the redesigned envelopes used in future elections.

“If there is something better that has a proven track record, I think it probably should be utilized in the city,” she said.

Edevbie said he understands the hesitation to implement change.

“I think the concern is how do people adjust to something new,” he said. “I think it would have been better if the change had been made a couple of elections ago back in March."

According to the Secretary of State's Office, 459 Detroit voters requested absentee ballots that never came and for some, it took weeks for the clerk’s office to process their request for an absentee ballot. And the lack of drop boxes in the city left many voters who wanted to vote absentee dependent on the Postal Service.

To avoid these mishaps in November, “everyone from voter to clerk needs to be proactive about their vote and the votes of our communities this year,” Edevbie said.

He believes that voters should submit their requests to vote absentee in November immediately and that the clerk’s office should send out all requested absentee ballots on Sept. 24, the earliest possible date allowed under Michigan law. Requests that come in after that date should be processed the same day, he argued.

When asked whether Detroit was ready to conduct an election with a large share of Detroiters expected to vote absentee, Edevbie said: “As of today, I’m not sure they’re completely ready, but they can be.”

Clara Hendrickson fact-checks Michigan issues and politics as a corps member with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Contact Clara at chendrickson@freepress.com or 313-296-5743 for comments or to suggest a fact-check.