 Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome My name is Barry rave. I'm a professor here at the Ford school And I'm the director of close-up the Center for local state and urban policy We're very pleased to welcome you to what is actually our fourth event of our speaker series for this for this academic term Elections are easy to take for granted and when we think of the challenges and effective administration and governance of elections We often point to places around the world that are deeply struggling Kenya Spain and the list goes on and on and Yet we need to be reminded periodically that these issues really never go away even in our own democracy Something we'll all be thinking about as we approach the next set of balloting opportunities here in Michigan very shortly So it would seem it's a very appropriate time for us to host this event The past present and future of elections in Michigan and beyond There are really two elements that we're trying to bring together today One is that the Center has just released a few hours ago a Survey about which you'll be finding a report. You'll be hearing more about this shortly for my colleague Deborah Horner about Work that the Michigan public policy survey has been doing to tap into the views of local government officials across the state both appointed and elected officials the MPPS is a remarkable tool unique to the state of Michigan and From my experience as director since this is a project that started long before I arrived on the scene is a great Example of what President Schlissel is talking about about the University giving back through public service and Significantly trying to inform discussion and debate in this case by really tapping into Public sentiment Amongst local officials to then inform the future relations between local and state Locality to locality and the like a really remarkable tool the report that we released earlier today was co-authored by Deborah Horner project manager of the Michigan Public Policy Survey and her co-author and colleague sitting in the back Tom Evacco the associate director of the Center who was sort of the architect behind the the initial creation of this and Has worked long on these issues has has has Deborah with great great impact here In this case we turn to elections and what Deborah will be doing is providing an overview of The study that was just released a few hours ago and going into some some real depth on that We're also delighted to be joined by Christopher Thomas who brings a remarkable public service career and set of credentials to this Issue and engagement for now more than four decades on these issues in this state, but also internationally That's meant direct leadership roles in in the state of Michigan over some period of time But also as you see from his bio Some really important service beyond the state of Michigan nationally different commissions and the like and we're very Very delighted to have him here to both provide instant Response to our findings, but also speak to these issues more generally going forward in this state and is noted in the title Beyond so I welcome all of you, but I particularly want to thank our colleagues Deborah Horner and Christopher Thomas for for sharing their insights Deborah, thank you Hi, thank you guys for coming this morning to talk with us about election administration on election day Eve 2017 as Barry mentioned I'm going to start off by talking today briefly about some new findings of From local elections about local elections here in Michigan based on surveys of our local officials Across the state and then I'll turn things over to Chris to talk about a little bit wider context The information I'm going to present to you today comes from a survey research program here at Ford School called the Michigan Public Policy Survey Or the MPPS so I'm going to give you a brief overview of how this survey data is collected And then we'll get to the good stuff which is what local officials tell us about elections in our cities and townships here in Michigan including how confident they are about their election accuracy what problems they're having What they think of plans to update equipment for voting and their support or opposition to a variety of election reform proposals That are floating around out there all of this and more is created in that new report that Barry mentioned It's on our close-up website. So so it's fun to have you in the room and be among the first people to learn what we found So the MPPS, let me tell you about it for a second. It is a census survey So what that means is we actually reach out to every single county Township village and city in the state of Michigan twice each year in the spring and in the fall now in the spring We primarily ask questions about fiscal health issues and then in the fall We often cover special topics, but there are also often issues covered in the spring waves That may be relevant to time wise and so this past spring we did ask about budget matters and workforce issues But we also wanted to ask about election administration given the experience here in Michigan across the the country of the November 16 election Now the MPPS typically goes to the top elected in the top appointed official in each jurisdiction So for example the city mayor and the city manager will get a copy of the questionnaire or the county board chair And the county administrator however for this wave because we were talking about a topic that was so specific to the office of Clerk in cities and in townships. These are the people who actually are in charge of administering the elections We also oversampled these local clerks So in cases where the township supervisor or the mayor of the city has already done a survey We still sent a shortened version of the questionnaire that just contain these questions about elections to the clerks as well So one of the extraordinary things about the Michigan public policy survey is our response rate Honestly, Michigan local officials are really into this program We typically a wave over wave receive over 70% of responses from all of the jurisdictions across the state Which is really extraordinary in survey research. That's that's a it's a really high rate We're very proud of it and for this portion of the 2017 Survey the part about election administration. We ended up with responses from 872 individual townships across the state which included clerks and supervisors 70% of them statewide and 88% of all Michigan cities participated in the survey So we we have really a great base from which to look at these questions in cities and townships of all sizes types regions Whatever it is, we're interested in in terms of their characteristics It also by oversampling these clerks It gives us a chance to look and compare between types of official that to see whether clerks and Managers or supervisors would have some different opinions on some of these topics All right, so let's get to the good stuff and see what they told us Clearly as citizens we care a lot about the accuracy of elections Just basically is every vote getting counted and are the people who should be voting voting So one important question we asked of local officials was Are your are you confident that the elections in your jurisdiction are indeed being conducted accurately and the news is pretty good The vast majority of Michigan cities and townships say yes 91% tell us that they are very confident in their accuracy of their elections Then there's 8% who say they're somewhat confident and only 1% who are telling us that they're not very Confident about their election accuracy therefore depending on if you're a 90% glass full kind of person You may see this is really good news on the other hand if you're more focused on the approximately 137 jurisdictions that that 9% slice represents Who are tell us that they are less than very confident about their accuracy? You might have some cause for concern All right, so remember how I said it's we have such a nice Responsory that allows us to break down the sample in really interesting ways Here's one way we break down the responses which is by jurisdiction type and the officials position So you can see from the chart on your right in that first column that township officials their township clerks and city clerks are even more confident in their elections Then are the mayors or supervisors or managers? So there's a lot of confidence among particularly among clerks Similarly regardless of the community size very few local leaders across the state express particularly low confidence So among the smallest jurisdictions those with only 1,500 or less residents Only 1% say they're not very confident in their ability to run an accurate election And the same is true of just 4% of the largest jurisdictions where most people live All right, so great. There's a lot of confidence out there However, you may have imagined the picture is not as rosy as you might wish it to be When we asked local officials about problems, they've experienced some areas of concern did pop up So most commonly cited problems statewide are ones related to recruiting poll workers Overall 29% of township and city officials statewide. That's among everyone indicate They have a significant problem or somewhat of a problem record repute recruiting poll workers who have the necessary skills to do the job So computer skills or just being able to follow a election protocol something like that And then there's 27% the next bar down who report problems simply recruiting enough workers at all regardless of their skill level And so this is across jurisdictions Statewide now there's also a quarter of jurisdictions about 25% who report the cost of election administration Is a real is a somewhat or significant problem for their jurisdictions budget? So cost is an issue of one of four of our jurisdictions statewide Now there's also some jurisdictions who report other problems with election equipment or failures, which are something I think we're going to hear a little bit more about Reliable internet service for communicating with the Secretary of State and wait times at polls Unfortunately the state's largest jurisdictions where most of our residents live and vote are more likely than the smaller jurisdictions to report They've got problems. So for examples when it comes to cities and townships of more than 30,000 residents Those who report they don't they can't recruit enough poll workers with necessary skills is 48% About half of our largest cities and townships say they can't recruit enough people who can work the polls And again about 39% say they can't Recruit enough people regardless of how skilled they are Equipment failures and malfunctions 24% of the state's largest jurisdictions report They have somewhat or significant problem with those And long wait times for voters at polls about 18% of our largest jurisdictions Errors by poll workers about 17% of our largest jurisdictions and Disturbances at polling places about 15% of the largest jurisdictions And at the same time our mid-sized cities and townships So those with between 10,000 and 30,000 Are particularly likely that say they are struggling with costs about 34% of them say that the impact on their budget is a Significant problem for their jurisdiction All right So as you can see from these two slides that are these two charts our townships and our city clerks are Most likely to be sounding the alarm on some of these problems in their jurisdictions So let's take recruiting poll workers with the right skills as an example. That's over here on the left You can see that among city clerks 52% more than half say that this is a problem for their city Compared with 38% of mayors and and city managers So the clerks are really concerned about this recruitment problem the mayor or city manager may or may not be as concerned Similarly among townships about 31% of township clerks say that this is a problem for their township compared with 24% of township supervisors and managers and a similar pattern can be seen for just the general recruitment of workers overall So the people that we think know the most about election administration are ones who are really most concerned on a lot of these problems We're seeing at the local level All right, so we back on that other slide We saw that a sixth of our respondents one in six jurisdictions of statewide told us they have somewhat or significant problems with voting Equipment failure one out of six and that includes one out of four a quarter of our largest jurisdictions That the same time only about 36% of the people said that this is not a problem at all. So we've got a You know one third glass full kind of problem here, but as it turns out There's already a plan in the works in the state of Michigan to update voting equipment Beginning this year it started and it's going to full replacement completed by August of next year According to this replacement plan county clerks are going to choose The equipment to be used commonly among all jurisdictions in the county And those are chosen from three vendors that were selected by the state administrative board and the state has pledged to cover Kind of most of the upfront cost of these new machines with individual cities and townships having to cover the rest of the cost If there's any outlying and then kind of after five years, they have to pay for the costs of maintenance and upkeep of the equipment So even though this plan that's out there has is requiring locals to dip into their own budgets There's a lot of support for it as you might imagine two-thirds 67% of our local officials overall say they somewhat or Strongly support the state initiative for changing the equipment by contrast only 8% somewhat oppose it and only 3% strongly oppose it This is might be because we haven't seen an update in our voting equipment in about a decade So I think a lot of our local officials think it's due and as you might imagine clerks Express significantly stronger support for the state initiative than do mayors or supervisor managers supervisors the managers among township clerks 81% say they support this plan for updating equipment and 84% of city clerk support it However, even among the non clerk officials So even among the state the mayors and the managers who may be more sensitive to local budget and cost issues There's very little outright opposition to the plan So this is one of the things that we've seen a lot of support among our local officials for getting this update We also asked local officials about a range of reforms related to election administration in the state And by far the strongest support is for changing our absentee voting rules And that's the top bar where the blue represents Support strong and somewhat support you'll notice in the my graphs because we're at the University of Michigan blue is always on the good side So currently Michigan requires those who want to submit an absentee ballot to meet some criteria You're old you're disabled you're gonna be out of the state for the election You have to kind of have a reason to submit about absentee ballot Which is different from a lot of other states which allow you to have a no excuse absentee ballot and just submit it If that's gonna be the most convenient way for you to vote Now when we asked local officials whether they would support moving toward a no excuse ballot here in the state of Michigan There was widespread support two-thirds percent 66 percent said yes including 43 percent who said they strongly support this this kind of move And only about 19 percent said they oppose this this kind of move to a change to no excuse balloting and this report this this particular Reform proposal has bipartisan support So a majority of officials who identify themselves on the surveys Republican 61 percent said yes They would like to go to no excuse about absentee ballots and among Democrats with 73 percent who support it So there was quite a wide base of support among different kinds of local officials for this Now there's also some support. You can see kind of moving down the slide Among people who are interested in Synchronizing voting lists between states about 50 percent of our officials say yes They support that stricter regulation of voting registration drives and stricter voting ID requirements And there's kind of mixed feelings among local officials about other possible election reforms such as pre-registering our 16 year olds when they go get a driver's license or Providing people with time off to vote on election day, which many of our schools are going to do tomorrow Meanwhile on the opposition slide the bottom three Our local government officials our city and township officials do not think much of the idea of having counties run elections for those local governments Who don't want to do it anymore? So when we asked them whether they think they would not so much that they would want the county to take over their elections But whether the county should be allowed to take to take on election duties 57% opposed this and 42% opposed it strongly. They want the counties to stay out of the election business Now Michigan officials also opposed a pretty widespread opposition to some reforms We've seen some other states adopt that we're interested in such as on-site early voting prior to election day about 50% of officials really opposed that possible reform and They opposed some same-day voter registration on election day two-thirds of local officials opposed that idea and only about 17% Support it. All right So if we want to get a snapshot about what local city and township officials in the state say is happening right now in terms of election administration Essentially, there's this vast majority out there who are very confident that their elections are accurate but there are a few jurisdictions that do have doubts and when it comes to Problems that they're having with their elections a substantial number say they are having problems recently and those problems tend to be most prevalent In our largest jurisdictions and while there's some support for change Particularly among getting new machines, even if they have to pay for them and then also to this absentee voting rule There's also a lot of resistance out there for some of the other reforms like consolidating elections at the county level or Early voting or on-site registration All right, so let me turn it out over to Chris who's going to help us decipher Some of how we got here and also where we're headed next Thank You Deborah. Can you all hear me? Okay? Yeah, okay, and put a clock where I can see it I see I got it. Okay. Okay. I'll stay within my time frame And if I get outside of it, please give me a wave I want to thank close-up for the Invitation to come down here today And I must say that I am most impressed with the survey and Obviously with the response rates When I was working We never had these kind of surveys. It would have been great and I've already talked to Deborah about setting up a Meeting with Secretary of State's Bureau of Elections to actually get an explanation of this Because I think it will assist them and their priorities in terms of working with the local election officials So when I received the call I was Fully retired. I retired in June of this past year I Was 40 years with Secretary States office 36 as director And I worked for four different secretaries of state so Richard Austin was the first he was a Democrat He was in office from 1971 through early 1995 Then Candace Miller for eight years then Terry Lynn land for eight years and now Ruth Johnson for her For seven of her years The last three were all Republicans so As director of elections, I was a civil servant Which is rather unique in the United States in the United States most directors are political appointees at will appointments I Guess I'm biased It allowed me to stand my job for 40 years But I also think it allowed Michigan to build continuity in their administration of elections and one thing I'll point out Is that I did serve on President Obama's Presidential Commission on election administration, and I would recommend that to all of you now You can find it on the election administrator election assistance commissions front page because The White House removed it very quickly beginning in 2017 from their website But in the introduction to that which was written by Nate personally who's a professor of political science and law at Stanford and was the academic director for the Commission points out that The United States is not the model for the world in terms of how elections are run You will go to other countries and you will not find elected officials as Elections as the election official You will not find an elected secretary state county clerk township clerk city clerk also running elections And elections in which they are on the ballot. It just doesn't happen And so we are unique in that and it raises its own specter of problems and challenges that must be overcome and I think that's easier in my view to one everybody knows their place in the world So I was not the policymaker while I was consulting on policy The secretary of state was the elected official and he or she is the one that made the calls my job was primarily implementation and they asked for my Comments on policy as well so The structure of how elections are run are critical one to perception and Two to the types of checks and balances that need to be built in to any system So I'm retired as I said, so it's a little scary at first, you know when you retire and many of you in this room Probably don't think a lot about retirement I'll just remind you to make sure you open your Roth IRA Couple dollars a month starting out is fine. It will pay off grandly in the end But it reminds everybody gives one advice about retiring and how terrible it can be and whatnot So always reminds me of Woody Allen's comment about death. He said well, I'm not afraid of it I just don't want to be there when it happens So That's been my view of retirement I retired for about two months and then I've gone back to work On a very a 20% level with a bipartisan policy center in Washington, DC They've received a grants from the democracy fund to go out and more or less pedal the recommendations from the presidential Commission on election administration and I'll talk about some of those things as we go through it so I'm on a couple of advisory boards ones with MIT they've Stewart or Charles Stewart has started the MIT data election data and science lab Which really is bringing the academic community and the election community together With some I think very good studies. It'll be coming out on how to address many of the issues So my work, I guess I could consider myself Involved but not really in the game, which is a great place to be I am enjoying retirement immensely So one other thing I'd recommend is wait until three months before you retired before you get married and It will present a whole nother series of challenges During your retirement and it will keep you focused. Let me tell you keep you very focused I'm married to an artist and she is very focused on her work and Keeps me focused on my work and taking care of business So Last June when I was doing my swan songs with various associations I spoke before the municipal clerks and I kind of clumsily I came up with a Statement that you know, we really can't take for granted that the world we grow into will only get better You really can't do that and I was fortunate that really in most of my career it did I Started working in the mid 70s So by the time I got into the business and I started in campaign finance is that the loss had come in to take care of many of the campaign finance issues The Voting Rights Act had passed in Michigan we dealt with a purge issue on Getting rid of two year and four year purges and basically ended up with almost ten years of no activity before you could Be removed Students were able to vote in college towns. I don't remember you few of you may remember what an issue that was You could not vote in a college town unless you went through a very comprehensive residency test to make sure That you really lived in in the town They loved your money, but they really didn't watch you vote in there and The courts and the legislators really were protecting voting rights and to some extent that is no longer the case and Every gain is is really hard fought so today I want to look back on Voting rights of African-Americans. I think this is a critical thing to keep in the forefront of our minds historically I'd like to discuss Michigan's electoral system and how it fits into the national scenes and what we've contributed nationally and Then finally I'll go through Sort of the list of horribles or challenges or whatever you would like to call them that are really on the plate not a horizon That we're all going to be dealing with Over the next series several years so let me start with Some history if you will and I'll be real honest with you. I didn't learn any of this in school I Learned this when I started teaching law school in 2001 That was my gift from the debacle and the Florida election Is it Cooley law school called me up and say hey you want to teach election law? Yeah, sure. Okay and I ended up with a great textbook the law of democracy and That book is so rich in history of elections That I would recommend it to anybody Who really wants to take a deep dive now like most textbooks particularly particularly law textbooks? It costs a lot of money But the nice thing was they always son free to professors It was a great thing so they tackled this issue of really some some Parts of the courts and obviously the Constitution that are not widely known and accepted in this country So looking at the voting rights of African-Americans is you know, it's really a rich election and in elections and participation it is Really not finely nuanced it's pretty blunt on how things worked out So in the beginning of our nation With the with the Constitution The drafters were not really giving the voters a lot of credit They did not put a lot of faith in the ability of the elector to select the leaders So the president was elected by the Electoral College, which was selected by state legislatures The US Senate was governed by senators that were elected by state legislatures the only direct democracy was for the US House of Representatives and You will not find a declaratory statement In the Constitution of the United States About who is eligible to vote in a federal election. It does not exist You go to state constitutions, and it will tell you who is eligible to vote the federal Constitution says that those Citizens who are eligible to vote for the state legislature Are then eligible to vote for the US House of Representatives So they left it to each state to make that decision not the federal government Now we didn't look so bad in the early days if you were a white male 50 to 75 percent of the white males in the late 1700s were eligible to vote and that compared favorably to England where it was only 20 to 25 percent So there's a lot of property ownership. Most of that was attached to the ownership of property So there is no guarantee and what you'll find in the various amendments to the constitutions are prohibitions you cannot Stop someone from voting because of race Religion 18 years old, but it doesn't have that that declaratory sentence in it While the election of president certainly didn't last very long at the state level After the fourth election more than half the states were Directly electing the electors And that certainly moved on the last state to do so where the state legislature did it was South Carolina in 1860 So with African Americans It was an easy and stark Not only could they not vote they were not citizens and they were only counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of Getting a population count to divvy up the number of seats that each state got in the House of Representatives There was no change until the reconstruction acts in era began in 1865 Unfortunately by 1876 The old guard had really kind of restarted to reassert itself and in the southern states they called this the redemption period And this is where the Democratic Party in the South basically reinstalled the Jim Crow Conditions then and basically got rid of most of the voters now. I'll give you an example each state between 1890 and 1910 in the South wrote a new constitution and In each of those constitutions were various devices that were designed to discourage and eliminate voting by African Americans in 1888 Louisiana had a hundred and twenty seven thousand African Americans registered to vote In that same year they had a hundred and twenty six thousand white Americans registered to vote By 1910 There were seven hundred and thirty African Americans registered to vote So you can see that it was a concerted state effort and this followed through in state after state after state in The southern tier of this country in 1903 a US Supreme Court opinion authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes Called Giles v. Harris a very little reported case Upheld Alabama's constitutional provision and basically at that point remove the federal court system From any jurisdiction Over really looking at any of these state constitutions He created in his opinion a catch 22 He said you are here Asking me to take over the Alabama Registration system at the same time you're arguing the Alabama registration system is unconstitutional So even if I had the power to take it over how could I take over and run an unconstitutional registration system and That basically removed the Supreme Court and green light was given To all of these constitutional provisions and For most intense and purposes they remained with us until 1965 But in the interim There were a number of other things that that that popped up the Australian ballot the secret ballot that we all hold to be so sacred Was also a device that was used To disenfranchise voters not only African Americans But poor whites and working-class people without education Prior to that time and I'll talk about this when we get to the selfies that everybody would like to take in the polling place In the olden days if you will Each party the state did not print ballots the parties printed the ballots and you walked into the polling place with one And they distribute those ballots And you held it up high so your employer could see which ballot you were sticking in the box So that had its own set of problems But once they came up with the Australian ballot where now you had to be able to read and You had education systems that really didn't teach people much or Anything at all for those that didn't go it became a real deterrent There's a whole series of the white primaries So when the South Really reinstituted or instituted the Jim Crow? The Democratic Party was king Republican Party which had passed the Reconstruction Acts which had Ensured that the registration of African Americans took place in the eight late 1860s many states in those early late 1860s early 70s had over 80% of the African Americans registered to vote the Democratic Party, which is the Jim Crow Party of the South They basically selected their candidates in the primary right the Republicans had no no chance to win in the general election at that time primaries were considered private and so Even if any African Americans, this is we're registered to vote and as we moved into the 1920s and 30s Some became registered They were able to keep them out. So there were a whole series of cases that ran all the way from 1924 through 1954 that finally held the primaries are part and parcel of the electoral process of the state and in fact No discrimination Could be employed So you can see the difficulty it takes when you go through the court process each case is five to seven years And then they change the law and they start all over again There were no civil rights bills between the Reconstruction period in 1957 the The voting rights section and civil rights division was actually established in the night in the Justice Department in 1957 and Up until that time Congress had refused to do any enforcement under the 14th or 15th amendments Both of which protected voting rights As the 1960s approached There really were not many appreciable gains in 1958 in Alabama and between 1958 and 1964 The registration of African-Americans in Alabama went from five point two percent to nineteen point four percent In Mississippi during that same period it went from four point four percent to six point four percent So You can see that the Voting Rights Act Was a necessity I think there's a Lyndon Johnson movie That's just come out which I've not seen yet Like Woody Harrelson's playing Lyndon Johnson The focus is quite a bit on the fact of what it took to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 It contained two critical provisions One is section two which applies to everybody it says you can't have devices that discriminate and Then secondly the more known is the pre-clearance provision and so if you meet a formula And the way the formula initially worked to cover the southern part of the United States Any change in your election process had to be pre-cleared by the US Department of Justice And a reason for that was as I've just indicated that the white primary cases took from 1924 to 1954 So when a law in a state was challenged and it went to the Supreme Court and was overturned The state would turn around and just modify the law and then the court case would start all over again So this said all right. We're done with that What will happen now is You will pre-clear it here before it goes into effect It was later expanded to include a number of foreign languages particularly Spanish speaking many Asian Languages as well Michigan in fact had two pre-clearance jurisdictions Blina Vista Township in Saginaw and Clyde Township in Allagan County two very small jurisdictions So what did pre-clearance mean to decision makers? What pre-clearance meant was that You knew as a legislator or a governor that whatever you're going to do is going to be looked at by the Department of Justice And as the years went on you could get a feel for what they were going to pre-clear and what they would refuse to pre-clear And so you trimmed your sale To meet that requirement So then and the Voting Rights Act was always set on a time It always expired and it had to be Re-enacted and it was re-enacted almost unanimously year after year each time It was sort of a third rail Folks didn't really want to step on that rail. So they didn't So what you ended up with was in 2009 in a obscure area Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District number one challenged a pre-clearance Mandate by the Justice Department Claiming that it was really out of date So the formula that was used that resulted in the South being covered and then later the languages Hadn't been changed since 1975 And so there were really two interesting questions Well, I'll wait for the next one what what the Supreme Court did In that case they didn't overturn pre-clearance. They warned the Congress that You need to do something about this formula. You need to update it Because the things have changed since 1975 Congress didn't they went and re-upped the The Voting Rights Act again. They did not change the formula Then we had Shelby County out of Alabama versus Holder And they did what they essentially threatened they were going to do and that was they found It to be unconstitutional Because of the standard So there were two questions to be asked the dissent Which were basically the liberal edge of the Supreme Court They basically said the question is is there still discrimination within these pre-clearance states? The majority of the court the more conservative element says Is anything different between these pre-clearance states and the rest of the states in the country and that was the question that they answered and said no and immediately or the case stood for the proposition of Undoing the pre-clearance which was a powerful tool It was a tool that made states really Think twice before they jumped and so what did we see after that? Texas North Carolina Arizona They jumped into the breach immediately With bills and laws that were passed that never would have been pre-cleared by the Department of Justice And so here we are the litigation game is on again. So yes section 2 survives It does prevent all of this, but again, it's going to be on a case-by-case basis So I bring this to you Only because I think that it's Critical to the understanding that one voting rights can be given they can be taken away and They can be encroached upon all of those things are possibilities and It requires the vigilance not only the election administrators, but all citizens to Stay in tune with what is going on So now I'll just briefly outline Michigan's election system and then I'll get into that great list We are an odd state In many respects Most states do not run their city their their elections at the city and township level. They run them at the county level And they do just fine Democracies alive and well in those states Wisconsin and Michigan Northwest Territory states Have left the actual running of our elections in the hands of city and township clerks My colleague over in Wisconsin has me be he's got 1800. I only have 1500 So my hat's off to him. That's a race. I gladly lose It's a real challenge when you have that many election officials with the expectation that they are all going to be up to the same level of competence to run elections The beauty is except for a handful of jurisdictions if one of them screws up, but really doesn't matter It does, but it's not going to make a huge bounce on the returns So out of our 1520 cities and townships about 900 of them are one or two precinct jurisdictions They generally will not have a paid clerk Not a full-time clerk that personal work at the hardware store on the farm Is there her deputy is usually their spouse If you want to find them to register to vote you know where they live you stop by the township halls are open for luncheons bingo and Probably a monthly meeting outside of that they're generally padlocked So It's it is hard. So many of the data points up here Reflects some of that Our role at the state level I say ours. It's not mine anymore. Thankfully. I won't let go of that Maybe by the time I'm done with this talk The state level is uniformity that's that's the whole deal that states supposed to do is make sure That these elections are run the same way in Detroit as they are in the Western UP and That that's what really occupies most of our time and that is basically done through education I'm happy to see that it's not all in-person Education any longer, but is a good deal of it is online and there's a very robust online training system that a Lot of local clerks complain about which is good because I know they've used it if they're complaining about it and So there have been changes we only have three elections in Michigan every year We used to be any day of the year could have been an election day in the past Special elections could be called quite rapidly and people were getting very tired of them They considered them stealth elections To do millage increases and whatnot So in the early around well 2003 the consolidation effort began and it's ended very interestingly So one it reduced the number to four. It's now moved down to only three election dates To it removes school officials. There goes 500 people that ran elections. Thankfully out of the business It took village clerks out of the business. There's another couple hundred So I thought that was a win-win we had like 700 people running elections They're no longer running them and left them with city and township and county clerks And our county clerks do have a role in elections. They print ballots They collect their returns election night. They handle the canvas. They do the recounts So they do have a role, but not the actual day-to-day role And then really the final piece which is really fascinating I just I still look back at it and Marvel that they pulled it off is that they have moved Most of the offices elected in this state to the even year general election So schools used to be in May Cities used to use odd years either in the spring or in the fall They have now put all the school elections on the even year general election So when you vote for president you do get to choose that school board member They moved villages which used to be February and April they moved them to the even year They decided the villages didn't need primaries. They could be nonpartisan And so they made them nonpartisan and you just file a petition that takes you directly there And now they've allowed the cities that were originally locked into the odd year general to now Move to the even year and they figure that's a free election that they won't have to any longer pay for So at some point we're going to end up with a whole kit and caboodle done on One election day every two years which makes for a very very long ballot Probably the longest ballot in the United States we've got about 7.3 million registered voters and On election day, we've had the largest part-time workforce over 30,000 people Are out there working in the precincts? so 4,800 different precincts, so I'm going to jump right to The list here because we're going to get a little short on time So what do you figure? It's 12 30 now another 10 minutes, okay, I'm going to run through this list Absent T Voting and online voter registration are both issues before the legislature The secure AV that Secretary Johnson is pushing is not the AV that these officials all love dearly The the AV absentee voting excuse me for the lingo Provision that was all That they all support here at the 70 some percentile is no reason by mail you can get a ballot I Think over 38 states Maybe more that have either No reason AV Early voting or both Michigan has neither So we have reasons as Deborah indicated The biggest reason is if you're 60 or over you can vote AV So for all you seniors that hit that 60 mark. It's a great day The other big use is I expect to be out of town on election day Some communities you would think nobody would be their election day with all these expectations So Ruth Johnson's come up with I think the only viable Proposal that's going to get through This Michigan legislature and that is what is kind of a secured AV you go to the clerk's office You do not you do not need a reason you will show ID and you'll be given a ballot So there's still a trip involved the mailman is not going to get in the way here so that is Hopefully will be enacted this year or next Almost was enacted last year We'll see Online voter registration again Michigan is behind the curve on that 38 states have online registration We are working with folks in Lansing to see if we can't bring that on It's very secure need a driver's license you go through the DMV to get it You're gonna have to give your social security number or your last four digits Your date of birth your driver's license number and most importantly your eye color So you'll be have to answer all those correctly in order to get into the system to register to vote We have that now and I point out to the student population here That you with a Michigan driver's license if you are already a registered voter Anytime you move you can go online and change your address That will change both your driver's license and your voter registration one trip No second trip to the clerk's office or any of that. So keep that in mind Out of state moves Synchronization would be wonderful. There's two programs that that are in play now one is Eric and one is Cross-check It's involved in all these fraud discussions They both provide a way for clerks to check on people who've moved to other states Lines so the presidential election or commission on election administration. That was a big thing President Obama On election night in 2012 says what's with these lines? We need to do something about it He put together a bipartisan commission unlike the one that is currently in operation the co-chairs Bob Bauer was Obama's campaign attorney Ben Ginsberg was Mitt Romney's campaign attorney. It was a bipartisanly run commission and Ben Ginsberg had a lot of veto power over What did or didn't get in it was decided from the beginning there would be one report? We'd not do a Republican and a Democratic report And it came out with a whole series of things on how to make election day a better place for Americans and Lines is one of them. No person should be required to wait more than a half hour to vote We've done a lot with lines here. They've gone down But as he slideshow I thought the most interesting one where the people that says Not much of a problem clerks hate to admit they have lines. This is like they just hate this It's like you know, they don't like it particularly elected clerks hate to admit it appointed clerks are pretty good They'll raise their hand so When all the others the strong or those were very minute, but there were large numbers 34% for townships and 40 for cities say not much of a problem, which means you have a problem, right? Somewhere in that city. You've got a problem that needs to be addressed So we are the state continues to work with them and so do we at the bipartisan policy center Recounts recounts we all remember the recount of last year. I remembered at least it was It was interesting it told us a lot about problems So you get back to getting skilled election workers on election day If they're not skilled enough to do the math that's necessary you end up with unbalanced the number of voters the number of ballots don't add up the precinct is not Recountable people get very angry about that the election night returns stand Nobody gets to see what really went on in that precinct So that's a critical thing There is legislation moving in Michigan to try to remedy some of that So the Russians are coming. Let's talk about them They seem to be everywhere these days. You can't pick the paper up So both at the federal and state level there's a lot going on and one thing I find incredibly interesting so the election assistance Commission was came out of the Florida debacle in 2000 and Assistance is their name as opposed to regulatory. They have no regulatory authority But they do great work in terms of making sure election officials know what's going on and what they ought to be doing for some reason there are our people in the Republican Majority in the house that are intent on killing this agency this agency has all of about 23 employees, okay? which is in Not even a drop in the bucket in Washington. Okay, it doesn't even snive in spritzer. It's nothing in this agency to kill this agency in the middle of What's going on with security? Would be crazy and and they have backed off Because now you have whole man security who know nothing about elections Who were going to walk in in October of last year? Declare that they were in charge of various security elements of the state's election systems, which Yeah, good luck So they have to rely on this election assistance Commission to even get up to speed On how it is they're going to go about securing and involving the federal government in The election process The states are all very much involved with looking at their own systems but Essentially, Michigan and most other states have gone to paper-based voter register election systems not touchscreen. Those are Slowly disappearing into the mist So if you got a paper ballot, which is the record of how that voter voted for recount purposes The tabulators are not connected to anything on election day The computers at the county level that accumulate the unofficial results are not connected to the Internet the canvas that takes that Electronic spreadsheet and compares it to the little slip of paper that comes out of each tabulator with the votes is audited for every single race so We have a system that would be very very difficult to On any kind of mass scale go in and change But clearly like anything else Systems are vulnerable and we're going to need to really Get up to speed. I'll skip the selfies because there's just too much fun We could talk for a half hour about self selfies, but don't do it. Please don't do it There's good reasons not to do it all the bad things that Self that that the paper ballot did fix would come back into being with selfies People would be asked to demonstrate how they voted with a picture of their ballot So let me Talk briefly about the The fraud and suppression Those are the two big issues Republicans fraud Democrats suppression In my humble opinion to a large extent on both sides, they're fundraising tools They use them to bang bang bang they raise money And if that's all it turned into I'd say great go ahead Doesn't do any buddy any good, but it doesn't do the damage the damage is when They go in and try to fix some of that stuff when there's really nothing to fix so the Pence Commission I noted the difference between that Commission and The PCA which one was bipartisan. This one is marginally bipartisan. It has two Democrats on it It has four people on it that have made their careers Basically on the on the fraud issue They may be good witnesses. I'm not sure they'd be great commissioners and There really is no documented Evidence of widespread concerted fraud in this country you can find pockets of fraud. Yes You will be hard-pressed to find it in Michigan You'll be hard-pressed to find it in most of this country You will find and they will find voter registration files that need a lot of work Hence the synchronization of files If that's what comes out of it is the resources necessary to fix all that that'd be super But it is very difficult to steal an election. It's very unlikely that any elections have been stolen We hear stuff. We've heard stuff for years about buses in Detroit Traveling around with the illegals That are then brought go from polling place to polling place Nobody's ever been able to document one of those and both parties have had challengers on election day all over the city of Detroit Not one photograph of a bus with people getting off and then moving to another polling place and getting off there So neither suppression nor Fraud are pervasive and so the one last thing I'll leave you with in terms of an issue is ID That is a battleground, right? And that's where the election wars are ID in Michigan works splendidly Because we have an out if you don't have an ID you sign an affidavit saying I don't have an ID You vote a regular ballot. You don't vote a provisional ballot your ballot counts You don't have to come back after the election and find an ID your ballot counts Splendid work. It works. It's usually a quarter percent Is the number of people that don't have their ID on election day? So there is talking Lansing about going to hard ID, which means the affidavit would go away If you don't have your ID you'd have to vote a provisional ballot Which means you got to come back at some point after the election usually within six days to show an ID The history is People don't come back after election day. They've done what they're going to do. It's hard enough to get them there once to get them there twice is Most difficult So I'm going to end with one quote yesterday I was amazed to see the New York Times actually had a column that was right on the money with my talk That's by John Grinspan with the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of American history And the column is the right to vote is never safe and He went through this period and talked about the period of 1867 which was called the summer of registration How interesting about a hundred years later the same thing was going on with people going down south trying to register people And that was the year that 80% were put on and he cautions in these in his column That it's not just the law that being to being to being that I went through but it's actually The culture that's involved in all of this So he says the story of a small group of former slaves first vote in 1867 Offers a final wrinkle Among them were the survivors of the wanderer when the last slave ships to arrive in Africa in 1858 These men went from living in what is now Angola to American slavery to democracy in under of a decade Many lost their votes within the following years if anyone's story proves That there's no natural arc of justice in the universe. It's theirs But that lack of guaranteed progress is motivating it means that we cannot sit back Confident that our institutions are protected by some immutable law People have lost rights. They once thought were secure and have won those they never thought possible We must be proud of our first vote and mindful of our last. Thank you