Committee reports AV electronic ballot bill for military and overseas voters

On Oct.21, the House Ethics and Elections Committee reported legislation to the House floor that would allow clerks the ability to provide electronic absentee voter (AV) ballots to members of the military and to overseas voters. House Bill 5279, as introduced by Rep. Vincent Gregory (D-Southfield), would allow a county, city, village or township clerk to transmit an AV ballot to an applicant's electronic mail address and would have the secretary of state establish rules on how that ballot is returned to the county, city, village or township clerk.

The legislation is an effort to address the timeliness of overseas AV ballots being returned to local clerks on or before Election Day to ensure the ballots are counted. Similar legislation is making its way through Congress that would provide for members of the armed services and overseas voters to choose whether to receive their ballot by regular mail or electronic mail for federal elections.

HB 5279 is likely to see significant changes before it is voted upon on the House floor. The Secretary of State's Bureau of Elections has suggested a substitute for HB 5279, which would outline mostly in state statute, rather than through rules, how the process would work. This version would allow a county, city, village or township clerk to electronically transmit a blank AV ballot application to a military or other overseas voter upon request. Following receipt of the application, the county, city, village or township clerk would then electronically transmit an absentee voter ballot not less than 45 days before an election to the voter.  The voter would then return by mail the completed AV ballot to the city or township clerk for processing.

While MTA supports the effort to ensure that military and overseas voter's AV ballots are counted, it does have some concerns about the proposed inclusion of county clerks in the process.  Currently, it is only the local clerks (city, village and township) that provide AV ballots to voters. By opening up the process to county clerks, there may be some confusion as whose responsibility it is to send the electronic AV ballots. MTA has suggested that issuing ballots should remain at only the local clerk level but does recognize that there may be two instances where county clerks should have the authority to electronically transmit ballots.

Those two instances would be where a local clerk (city, village or township) does not have the means to electronically transmit the AV ballot application or ballot to the military or overseas voter. The other situation would be in very limited situations where a county clerk is serving as the school district election coordinator and is authorized to mail AV ballots. Usually, even in the case where the local clerk has declined to run a school election, that local clerk is still responsible for distributing, receiving and processing AV ballot applications and ballots.  However, in a few situations around the state it is actually the county clerk serving as the school district election coordinator who sends out the AV ballot. The ability of the county clerk to send out AV ballots for school district elections in these situations should be maintained.

MTA will continue to work to improve HB 5279 as it moves through the legislative process.