In 2020, the presidential race in Michigan wasn’t called until nearly 6 p.m. the day after Election Day — roughly 22 hours after polls closed.
This year, election administrators in Detroit expect the counting will be done much sooner.
Changes to Michigan election law have expanded early voting in the state, and now allow election workers to pre-process and count mail ballots before Election Day.
In Detroit, the state’s most populous city, 110,000 mail ballots were issued and officials expected to count 100,000 of them before Tuesday, explained City Clerk Janice M. Winfrey.
In addition to expediting the counting process, these changes should help Detroit avoid a repeat of 2020, when a crowd of Republican observers, angry about false rumors of voting fraud spreading on social media, caused chaos at the vote count center.
Detroit became the target of Donald Trump’s false narrative that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
“In Detroit there were hours of unexplained delay in delivering many of the votes for counting,” Trump said at the time. “The final batch did not arrive until 4 in the morning. And nobody knew where they came from.”
In reality, that “final batch” of votes were legally cast mail ballots that took longer to be delivered.
Copyright 2024 NPR