A technological issue temporarily disrupted early voting on Saturday, the first day Michiganians could cast ballots into tabulators at voting sites across the state for the Aug. 6 primary.
Angela Benander, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office, said a “server issue” affected the performance of electronic pollbooks, which track voters and ballots in specific jurisdictions, on Saturday morning.
“The Bureau of Elections and clerks are always prepared in case of possible connectivity or technology problems during early voting, and the early voting process is designed to allow voting to continue using a secure offline backup procedure if technology is temporarily unavailable,” Benander said. “The backup process worked.
“Voters were able to cast their ballot and all voters and ballots will be recorded and accounted for.”
Because of the issue, Michael Siegrist, the Canton Township clerk, said his township used paper to track voting from about 8:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. when the technology began functioning normally.
The problem was resolved statewide by 1 p.m.
Few Metro Detroit residents trickled in to early voting sites on Saturday, which marked the first of nine days of early in-person voting. After voters cast their ballot, clerks across the state will feed their ballot into a vote-counting tabulator to be tallied after polls close Aug. 6.
Only 28 people had come by the Royal Oak Senior Community Center by 1 p.m. on Saturday, falling short of some poll workers’ expectations, Tricia Graziano, chairperson for the elections board in Royal Oak told The News.
Graziano said the computer system malfunction forced staff at the Royal Oak poll site to help residents cast their votes by hand, Graziano said.
“Our computers were just spinning,” she said. “They weren’t letting anything come up and then the voters weren’t coming up.”
Daniel Baxter, director of elections for the city of Detroit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Graziano and other site staff had to go to City Hall to ensure that residents were registered to vote and that they did not have an absentee ballot before printing ballots for voters to fill in, she said.
Once people cast their votes, site staff entered ballots into the computer system by hand, she said. The process didn’t slow anyone down significantly, but the issue was an unexpected twist to the first day of early voting, she said.
Graziano had worked at the same site in February as more than 78,000 Michigan residents voted early for the presidential primary.
“Everybody that comes here always says what a good idea it is,” Graziano said of early voting. “Like, not one person has complained. They didn’t even complain when the system went down.”
Early voters were harder to come by at some Detroit sites, including the Northwest Activities Center and Palmer Park Community Center, where residents appeared scarce.
After a successful constitutional amendment in 2022 authorized early voting, Michigan lawmakers approved bills in 2023 to require at least nine days of early voting across Michigan and allow clerks to work together to provide sites where ballots could be filled out and fed into tabulators before Election Day.
For the primary, the early voting period goes from Saturday through Aug. 4.
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Source Link: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/07/27/technology-issue-disupts-first-day-of-early-voting-in-michigan-primary/74557897007/
A technological issue temporarily disrupted early voting on Saturday, the first …
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