Technical issues temporarily halted early voting on Saturday, the first day Michiganders could cast their ballots on tabulating machines at polling places across the state for the Aug. 6 primary election.
Angela Benander, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, said Saturday morning that a “server issue” had affected the performance of electronic poll books that track voters and ballots in certain jurisdictions.
“The Department of Elections and clerks always prepare for the possibility of connectivity or technical issues occurring during early voting, and our early voting process is designed to allow voting to continue if technology becomes temporarily unavailable, using secure offline backup procedures,” Benander said. “The backup processes worked.”
“Voters can vote and every voter and ballot will be recorded and logged.”
Because of the issues, Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist said the township used paper to record votes from about 8:30 a.m. until 11 a.m., when the technology began working properly.
By 1 p.m., the problem had been resolved across the state.
A trickle of metro Detroit residents trickled out to early polling locations on Saturday, the first day of nine days of early voting. After voters cast their ballots, clerks around the state will feed them into vote-counting machines to be counted after the polls close on Aug. 6.
Royal Oak Board of Elections Chair Tricia Graziano told The News that only 28 people had shown up to the Royal Oak Senior Community Center by 1 p.m. Saturday, below poll workers’ expectations.
Graziano said a glitch in the computer system forced poll workers in Royal Oak to help residents vote by hand.
“Our computers were just spinning,” she said. “Nothing was coming up, no voter names were coming up.”
Detroit’s elections director, Daniel Baxter, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Graziano and other field staff had to go to City Hall to verify that residents were registered to vote and didn’t have an absentee ballot before printing out ballots for voters to fill out, she said.
Once voters have cast their ballots, staff at the venue will manually enter them into a computer system, she said. While this process doesn’t cause significant delays, it does present a problem, she said, as it creates unexpected developments on the first day of early voting.
Graziano was working at the same location when more than 78,000 Michiganders voted early in the presidential primary in February.
“Everybody that comes in here always says early voting is a great idea,” Graziano said of early voting. “Nobody complained. Nobody complained when the system went down.”
Early voters were even harder to find at some polling places in Detroit that appeared to have few residents there, including the Northwest Activities Center and Palmer Park Community Center.
Following the passage of a constitutional amendment allowing early voting in 2022, the Michigan Legislature approved a bill in 2023 that would require at least nine days of early voting across Michigan and allow clerks to work with states to provide locations where ballots can be marked and inserted into tabulating machines before Election Day.
The early voting period for the primary election begins Saturday and runs through Aug. 4.
