...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...
pandemic.
"By mailing applications, we have ensured that no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote," Benson said in a statement. "Voting by mail is easy, convenient, safe, and secure, and every voter in Michigan has the right to do it."
"We appreciate that some clerks are proactively protecting public health by mailing applications to all their registered voters, and we are fulfilling our responsibility to provide all voters equal access," the Michigan official continued. "We know from the elections that took place this month that during the pandemic Michiganders want to safely vote."
The Michigan Department of State’s Bureau of Elections will send voters a letter containing instructions on how to vote via mail and require applicants to mail back a signed application. Conversely, voters can email a photo of their signature to a local election clerk.
"The vast majority of voters across the political spectrum want the option to vote by mail," added Benson. "Mailing applications to all registered voters is one of the ways that we are ensuring Michigan’s elections will continue to be safe, accurate, and secure."
Currently, approximately 1.3 million Michigan voters out of the state’s 7.7 million registered voters are on the permanent absent voter list.
In March, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
...Her Excellency, the dictator of Michigan, 2020 Dem VP contender...(D), who is under consideration to be former Vice President Joe
Foreign Policy Whiz KidBiden
...
When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'...
’s running mate, expanded absentee voting by allowing the state mail ballot applications to every voter in around 50 jurisdictions.
Earlier May, Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed an executive order permitting all registered voters in the state to vote by mail in the upcoming presidential election, also citing health concerns from the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh slammed Newsom’s decision, calling it a "thinly-veiled political tactic" to "undermine" election security.
| Milwaukee sums up their vote by mail problems: |
Nearly 2,700 absentee ballots in Milwaukee were not sent and about 1,600 in the Fox Valley were not processed because of computer glitches and mailing problems, according to the most comprehensive account yet of what went wrong in the April 7 election.
In Milwaukee, 2,693 voters were not sent absentee ballots after technical issues marred their production on March 22 and March 23, according to a report by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
The election for a seat on the state Supreme Court, the presidential primary and a host of local offices, put a global spotlight on Wisconsin for holding an election in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
A separate problem emerged when about 1,600 ballots for the Appleton and Oshkosh areas were found at a mail processing center the day after the election. It was not clear in the report if the ballots were on their way to voters or on their way back to clerks when they were found. Either way, they were discovered too late to be counted.
As officials urged people to stay at home as much as possible to avoid the spread of the coronavirus, voters turned to absentee ballots in unprecedented numbers. Often, clerks could not keep up with demand, the report notes.
The technical problems in Milwaukee occurred late on March 22 and carried into early March 23, when the Milwaukee officials attempted to print thousands of mailing labels for absentee ballots. The problem occurred because of “an extraordinary confluence of events” with technology, according to the report.
Milwaukee election workers used a state computer system to process an unusually large number of ballot requests at once, which took hours to generate, according to the report. At the same time, state tech workers — unaware of what Milwaukee workers were doing — restarted their servers to address an unrelated issue.
The system processed the ballots it was supposed to but later indicated that 2,693 additional absentee ballot requests had been processed even though they had not, according to Neil Albrecht, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. The problem was not figured out until after the election.
"It wasn’t our error," Albrecht said. "There was no way for us to identify the error when it occurred."
Restarting the servers did not affect sending ballots in other parts of the state, according to the report.
The day after the election, the Elections Commission received a call from an election mail coordinator in the Chicago office of the U.S. Postal Service who said three tubs of absentee ballots for the Appleton and Oshkosh area had been found. Later, the postal service said the tubs contained about 1,600 ballots.
According to the report, a large number of absentee ballots generated for voters in Oshkosh on March 24 were never returned. The report concludes those ballots faced mailing problems or mailing labels were never applied to the ballot envelopes.
In another issue that has been previously reported, the post office repeatedly returned absentee ballots to Fox Point Village Hall that had never been delivered to voters. The report could not determine how many ballots were affected, but noted 150 or more undelivered ballots were returned to the village on election day.