(WXYZ) — With less than 3 months to go for Michigan’s primary elections to take place, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is calling for nonpartisan legislative changes.
Benson says, “Michigan voters deserve election results on election night and for their elections to be sufficiently funded.”
"If legislative leaders truly want to bolster faith in our elections, they need to give voters election results on election night," she continued.
Preprocessing absentee ballots before election night is one of the 4 legislative changes being proposed by the Secretary of State.
As per the current Michigan law, voters have to wait up to 24 hours after polls close to get absentee results.
"That's when election deniers and other conspiracy theorists have time to fill the space between when the polls close and when the results are announced with false conspiracy theories," said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Continuing towards building voter confidence, Secretary Benson called for dedicating 100 million dollars annually towards strengthening election security, followed by increasing penalties for anyone who threatens or harasses election workers, and, lastly, allowing military service members and their spouses overseas to return their ballots electronically.
"Nearly 25% of military ballots were returned too late to be counted or not counted at all in the 2020 presidential elections. That is unacceptable," said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Meanwhile, here in Michigan, Secretary Benson believes the trend of voting from home will continue in a post COVID-19 world.
"Over 2/3, 3.3 million of the 5.5 million citizens who voted in 2020, voted from home. We are seeing that many are going to do so again. It likely may not be that high, but we have to plan for it so that we have provisions in place, machines in place, and workers in place to handle that increase," said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Michigan’s primary elections will be held on August 2nd, while the general election is set for November 8th.
