Absent Voter Law: Ann Arbor Complies Early
Next Tuesday, Ann Arbor voters will choose the Democratic nominees to appear on the November ballots for city council seats in two of the city’s five wards: Ward 3 and Ward 4.
Electronic tabulation equipment for the Aug. 6, 2013 election. From left: Ann Arbor city clerk Jackie Beaudry, deputy clerk Jennifer Alexa, and chief of police John Seto. Beaudry and Seto are members of the city election commission. The third member is city attorney Stephen Postema, who was absent from this Aug. 1 meeting.
Ballots cast by absent voters in the Aug. 6 primary election will be handled a bit differently than in previous elections – which will bring the city into early compliance with a state law enacted last year. It means that the election results for absent voters will be broken down by precinct. [.pdf of Act 272 of 2012]
The basic approach to counting absent voter ballots in this election will be consistent with the procedure used in the last few years: In elections when precinct delegates for political parties are not being selected by voters, absent voter count boards are established – separate from the in-person precinct polling places.
The alternative would be to transport the absent voter ballots to each precinct location, where election workers at the precincts would feed the absent ballots through the same machine that counts in-person votes.
So for the Aug. 6 count, two separate absent voter count boards will be established – one for Ward 3 and one for Ward 4.
What’s different this year is compliance with Act 272 of 2012, which requires a precinct-by-precinct count within the set of absent voter ballots. The new law applies to elections that take place after July 1, 2014, but the city is complying with that procedure for this primary election.
In past years, election results for absent voter count boards were aggregated by ward, and were not broken out by precinct. [Full Story]