Election officials in battleground Michigan grapple with sweeping voting changes and a presidential election

This year, voting will be far easier for Michigan residents, thanks to new laws. But the changes have made running elections in the battleground state much harder.

This year, voting will be far easier for Michigan residents – thanks to new laws that establish early voting, automatically send out absentee ballots to voters who requested them and mandate that every community has least one drop box in which to return those ballots. But the changes have made running elections in this crucial presidential battleground much harder – leading some to worry about burnout among the state’s more than 1,500 local clerks, who must juggle increasingly complex election responsibilities with other duties, ranging from town record-keeping to licensing pets. “We just put a Ferrari engine inside a Model T car,” Michael Siegrist, the clerk of Canton Township, said of the sweeping effort to modernize elections in a state that still conducts balloting under a decades-old, hyperlocal system. The scramble to implement Michigan’s new voting rules also comes in a highly charged climate under which a simple mishap could fuel fresh – and false – conspiracy theories about election fraud. In the 2020 general election, human error in the Republican stronghold of Antrim County in northern Michigan briefly led to the unofficial results showing Joe Biden ahead when Donald Trump had won the county. Despite assurances from state and local election officials that no foul play was involved, the situation quickly spiraled, with Trump allies attempting to cast doubts about Biden’s victory by making meritless claims that tabulators had switched votes from Trump to Biden. The state’s highly decentralized system of administering voting means that “Michigan has 1,500 elections every big election day,” said Kyle Whitney, the city clerk of Marquette in the state’s Upper Peninsula. That helps ensure that balloting and vote-counting is secure because it’s impossible, he said, to “do one thing en masse that could influence the election on a large scale.”