Don’t fall for misinformation: Here’s what you need to know about Election Day in Detroit

A new law gives local elections officials more time to process and tabulate mail ballots, which should help alleviate the logjam that slowed ballot counting in the 2020 presidential election.

Cities and towns with at least 5,000 people may begin processing and tabulating ballots up to eight days before Election Day, while smaller jurisdictions may begin the morning before Election Day. Detroit is among the cities that can begin processing earlier.

In 2020, more than 3.1 million voters in Michigan cast their ballots by mail, about 56% of all ballots cast. State law at the time prevented election workers from opening the envelopes and preparing ballots for the count until the night before Election Day. Trump took an early lead in the vote count on election night, but that lead began to erode overnight and early Wednesday morning and Biden took the lead later that afternoon.

The law change may result in a speedier release of mail voting totals and may mitigate the so-called “red mirage” that Trump falsely claimed was evidence of voter fraud in Michigan and in a handful of other key states.

This also explains why voters saw late-night and early-morning ballot drop offs at Huntington Center during the 2020 election; they were legitimate ballots that were being dropped off to be counted because they weren’t able to begin counting them until voting was complete. While officials hope the new law will help, it is entirely possible ballots will be delivered to Huntington Center well into the early morning hours on November 6.

Election officials nationwide found no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft related to the use of drop boxes that that could have affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. And yet no place in this year’s election may face more scrutiny than the drop box – a tool designed to make voting easier that’s become the source of conspiracy theories that they played a role (they didn’t) in stealing the election from Trump (it wasn’t). Several states have enacted laws restricting their use since 2020, while in others they remain the subject of fascination.

Election officials typically have detailed processes to ensure the security of ballots left in drop boxes, which are often monitored remotely by camera. Still, drop boxes remain a place where opponents wrongly believe their vote is neither safe nor secure.

Almost all of the roughly 160 million ballots that will be cast in this year’s election will be made of paper. And almost all will be counted by machine. Election officials say without such machines, counting those ballots by hand would take much longer, cost taxpayers far more and result in errors that would then take even more time and money to fix. “Human beings are really bad at tedious things, and counting ballots is among the most tedious things we could do,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Charles Stewart. “Computers are very good at tedious things. They can count very quickly and very accurately.” Still, the desire to have humans involved in the process lingers. Officials in Georgia remain at odds over a recent directive from the state’s election board requiring poll workers to count the total number of ballots by hand.

Election officials rely on various pieces of technology. Every office does things a little bit differently.

Officials rely on a voter registration system that is a database of registered voters and have an election management system that workers use to create, issue and track ballots. They also use an election-night reporting system that reports unofficial results. Many jurisdictions use electronic pollbooks to check in voters at polling locations.

All this depends on software and computers, a reliance that carries risks that officials work to identify and address. For example, election officials often will isolate critical systems from the internet and use storage devices, such as secured USB sticks, to transfer data. They limit access to sensitive equipment to only those who need it and have logs that track and monitor the devices.

When an internet connection is needed, election officials will often use private networks to limit the risk of malicious activity and take other steps to scan their systems for potential vulnerabilities and threats.

Voters in much of the country fill out ballots by hand, and then that ballot will be scanned and counted electronically. A few places, mostly small towns in the Northeast, will count their ballots by hand.

In some areas, voters use a computer to mark their ballots electronically and then get a printout of their choices that they insert into a scanner for counting. In other cases, the ballot is cast electronically, and a paper record is printed that summarizes the votes cast. That record is then available if a hand-count is needed.

With a few exceptions, no. There are some jurisdictions in a few states that allow for ballot scanners in polling locations to transmit unofficial results, using a mobile private network, after voting has ended on Election Day and the memory cards containing the vote tallies have been removed.

Election officials who allow this say it provides for faster reporting of unofficial election results on election night. They say the paper records of the ballots cast are used to authenticate the results during postelection reviews, and that those records would be crucial to a recount if one was needed.

Computer security experts have said this is an unnecessary risk and should be prohibited.

Election officials say they have worked extensively to shore up security around their voting equipment after an effort by Russia to scan state voter registration systems for vulnerabilities in 2016.

There was no evidence then that any data was changed or deleted, but it led the federal government to declare the nation’s election systems as critical infrastructure. That allows the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to provide free cybersecurity reviews and vulnerability testing to election offices nationwide.

“Today, eight years later, because of all the incredible work by election officials to strengthen the security and resiliency of our election process, election infrastructure has never been more secure, and the election stakeholder community has never been stronger,” the agency’s director, Jen Easterly, told reporters in September.

Computer security experts have called for more to be done and for election officials to limit the use of certain technology, specifically machines that mark ballots for voters. A long-running court battle in Georgia has sought to compel the state to get rid of these machines in favor of hand-marked paper ballots.

Experts have also raised particular concern about a series of security breaches that occurred after the 2020 election as Trump allies sought access to voting systems in Georgia and elsewhere as they tried to prove their unsubstantiated claims. The experts have warned that the public release of critical election software because of the breaches has raised “serious threats” and have called for a federal investigation.

Election officials say there are safeguards in place to ensure that voting systems are not manipulated. That begins with physical security, such as locked rooms with limited access and the use of tamper-evident seals. In addition, voting equipment is tested before the election, a process that includes running test ballots through the equipment to ensure votes are being counted correctly.

Postelection reviews are conducted to identify any mistakes or errors that may have occurred.

Around 98% of all ballots cast in this year’s election will include a paper record, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice based on data collected by Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting equipment in the U.S. Officials say that’s important for ensuring that any error or cyberattack will not prevent officials from producing an accurate record of the vote.

Voting more than once, tampering with ballots, lying about your residence to vote somewhere else or casting someone else’s ballot are crimes that can be punished with hefty fines and prison time. Non-U.S. citizens who break election laws can be deported.

For anyone still motivated to cheat, election systems in the United States are designed with multiple layers of protection and transparency intended to stand in the way.

For in-person voting, most states either require or request voters provide some sort of ID at the polls. Others require voters to verify who they are in another way, such as stating their name and address, signing a poll book or signing an affidavit.

People who try to vote in the name of a recently deceased friend or family member can be caught when election officials update voter lists with death records and obituaries, said Gail Pellerin, a Democratic in the California Assembly who ran elections in Santa Cruz County for more than 27 years.

Those who try to impersonate someone else run the risk that someone at the polls knows that person or that the person will later try to cast their own ballot, she said.

For absentee voting, different states have different ballot verification protocols. All states require a voter’s signature. Many states have further precautions, such as having bipartisan teams compare the signature with other signatures on file, requiring the signature to be notarized or requiring a witness to sign.

That means even if a ballot is erroneously sent to someone’s past address and the current resident mails it in, there are checks to alert election workers to the foul play.

A growing number of states offer online or text-based ballot tracking tools as an extra layer of protection, allowing voters to see when their ballot has been sent out, returned and counted.

Federal law requires voter list maintenance, and election officials do that through a variety of methods, from checking state and federal databases to collaborating with other states to track voters who have moved.

Ballot drop boxes have security protocols, too, said Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.

She explained the boxes are often designed to stop hands from stealing ballots and are surveilled by camera, bolted to the ground and constructed with fire-retardant chambers, so if someone threw in a lit match, it wouldn’t destroy the ballots inside.

Read more about this common misconception.

After the 2020 election, social media surged with claims of dead people casting ballots, double voting or destroyed piles of ballots on the side of the road.

Former President Donald Trump promoted and has continued to amplify these claims. But the vast majority of them were found to be untrue.

An Associated Press investigation that explored every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by Trump found there were fewer than 475 out of millions of votes cast. That was not nearly enough to tip the outcome. Democrat Joe Biden won the six states by a combined 311,257 votes.

The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots. In one case, a man mistakenly thought he could vote while on parole. In another, a woman was suspected of sending in a ballot for her dead mother.

Former election officials say that even more often, allegations of voter fraud turn out to result from a clerical error or a misunderstanding.

Pellerin said she remembered when a political candidate in her county raised suspicion about many people being registered to vote at the same address. It turned out the voters were nuns who all lived in the same home.

Patrick said that when she worked in elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, mismatched signatures were sometimes explained by a broken arm or a recent stroke. In other cases, an elderly person tried to vote twice because they forgot they had already submitted a mail ballot.

“You really have to think about the intent of the voter,” Patrick said. “It isn’t always intuitive.”

Read more from Malachi Barrett on Michigan’s voter rolls.

It would be wrong to suggest that voter fraud never happens.

With millions of votes cast in an election year, it’s almost guaranteed there will be a few cases of someone trying to game the system. There also have been more insidious efforts, such as a vote-buying scheme in 2006 in Kentucky.

In that case, Grayson said, voters complained and an investigation ensued. Then participants admitted what they had done.

He said the example shows how important it is for election officials to stay vigilant and constantly improve security in order to help voters feel confident.

But, he said, it would be hard to make any such scheme work on a larger scale. Fraudsters would have to navigate onerous nuances in each county’s election system. They also would have to keep a large number of people quiet about a crime that could be caught at any moment by officials or observers.

“This decentralized nature of the elections is itself a deterrent,” Grayson said.

Four years after canvassers nearly blocked vote certification, Michigan has new rules in place designed to prevent meddling this year.

Nearly a dozen county canvassers tasked with certifying Nov. 5 results have openly questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 contest. State officials warn that canvassers who fail to certify the election could face misdemeanor criminal charges.

An amendment to the Michigan Constitution approved by Michigan voters in 2022 made clear that county canvassers have “non-discretionary duty” to certify results tabulated by local election officials from both major political parties. And state laws include potential criminal penalties for those who won’t.

“If somebody doesn’t do their duty as a canvasser, at the state level or on the county level, they can be removed from office and, ultimately, prosecuted,” said Ahogho Edevbie, Deputy Secretary of State under Democrat Jocelyn Benson.

Read more about this from Bridge Michigan.

The Associated Press and major television networks often make calls in the race for who will be the next president before all the votes are counted. But why does the news media play that role in the first place? Shouldn’t that be the government’s job?

State and local governments do run and administer American elections, including the race for president. They are responsible for counting the votes and maintaining the official record of who won and by how much.

But the official process — from poll close to final certification — can take the states anywhere from several days to more than a month. In the race for the White House, it’s not until early January that the formal process of picking the president via the Electoral College is complete. No federal agency or election commission provides updates to the public in the meantime about what’s happening with their votes.

“That’s a gap in the Constitution left by the founders that AP stepped in to fill just two years after our company was founded,” said David Scott, a vice president at AP who oversees the news agency’s election operations. “It was essential then, as it is today, that Americans have an independent, non-partisan source for the whole picture of the election — most critically of the very vital news of who has won the election.”

Although determining a winner before any votes have been counted may seem counterintuitive, race calls at poll closing time in uncontested or landslide races have been a routine part of election nights for decades, even though competitive, hotly contested races that can take hours, days or even weeks to decide tend to be the most memorable and attract the most attention.

The Associated Press will consider multiple factors and analyze available data before determining whether a winner can be declared when polls close in a given state. But the AP will never declare the outcome in a competitive contest before enough votes are counted to make the winner clear.

Uncontested races

Many of the races called just as the polls close are uncontested elections where only one candidate appears on the ballot and is therefore the only possible winner of the race. Voters in some parts of the country live in multimember districts for offices such as state legislature, where more than one candidate is elected in a district. In those districts, an uncontested race is one where the number of candidates on the ballot is equal to or less than the number of seats available in that district.

In the 2024 general election, the AP will declare winners in nearly 2,000 uncontested races, compared with about 4,500 contested races.

Noncompetitive contests

Sometimes it’s possible to declare winners at poll closing time in noncompetitive races with multiple candidates in areas where one political party has an established history of lopsided victories. In these cases, the AP will analyze multiple sources of available data, including the results of AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of both voters and nonvoters that determines who voted, how they voted and why, to confirm the outcome.

The AP will not call a race when polls close if AP VoteCast’s results indicate a deviation from the state’s long-standing political trends and voting history. AP VoteCast results will be available for all 50 states, though only a small number will be considered as potential poll close calls. There is no AP VoteCast survey in the District of Columbia, so no contest there will be called when polls close even though the nation’s capital has a long history of overwhelming victories for Democratic candidates.

For example, the AP’s poll close calls in the 2020 presidential election included Wyoming, a state that last voted for a Democrat in 1968 and that Donald Trump won over Joe Biden by 44 points; and Massachusetts, which last voted for a Republican in 1984 and that Biden won by 34 points over Trump.

A handful of states and districts have multiple poll closing times because they are in more than one time zone. In these cases, the AP will not declare a winner before the final poll closing time in that state or district. Florida, Texas and some others begin to release vote results from most of the state shortly after polls close in the earlier time zone. Votes that are already counted from areas in the earlier time zones will also be considered in determining whether a winner can be declared at the moment when the last polls close.

Other election data the AP takes into account include an area’s voting history from recent elections, voter registration statistics and pre-Election Day polling.

When the above data points confirm the expected result in a state where either major party has a history of dominating elections, the AP may call the race as soon as voting ends.

Declaring election winners

The presidential election has more moving parts than any other contest on the ballot, including the complexities of the Electoral College. The Constitution directs each state to determine its own electors and send the results of their votes for president to the National Archives and to Congress, to be tallied a few weeks after Election Day.

In modern elections, with states having directed electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state, voters know who has won the White House well before the formalities of the Electoral College play out through the “race calls” made by the AP and the networks. They’re not official government decrees, but they provide the country with a timely and independent assessment of the state of a race.

“The AP’s standard is to call a race whenever we are 100% certain there is no path for the trailing candidate to overtake the leading candidate,” said Anna Johnson, the news agency’s Washington bureau chief. “The AP uses that same standard for all race calls from the presidency all the way down the ballot. Independent and timely race calls by the AP and other media outlets help ensure voters understand not just who won a race, but how they won the race.”

At The Associated Press, a race is “too early to call” if election officials are still tabulating votes and there is no clear winner. Regardless of how tight the margin may be between the leading candidates, AP won’t say a race is “too close to call” unless election officials have tallied all outstanding ballots — save for provisional ballots and late-arriving mail and absentee votes — and the winner still remains unclear. In those cases, it’s likely AP won’t be able to say who has won until election officials certify the results — a process that may take up to several weeks after Election Day. By the way, elections headed to a recount aren’t automatically “too close to call.” In fact, depending on how many votes separate the trailing candidates from the leader, AP may declare a winner even if a recount is possible.

Looking for “precincts reporting” when watching as results are reported in this year’s election? Chances are, you’ll find an estimate of “expected vote” instead. The Associated Press and other news organizations have moved away from precincts reporting as a measure of election turnout for several reasons – the fact that well more than half of voters no longer cast their ballot in person at a neighborhood “precinct” on Election Day chief among them. Instead, AP will estimate how much of the vote election officials have counted – and how many ballots they have left to count – based on a number of data points, including details on advance ballots cast, registration statistics and turnout in recent elections. Those estimates will change as votes are counted and more information about the exact number of ballots cast becomes available. AP’s estimates of ballots cast won’t reach 100% until election results are certified as final and complete.

More often than not, in a nation as evenly divided as the United States, not on Election Day — or, at the least, not on Election Day on the East Coast. Since it took 36 days for George W. Bush’s win in the 2000 presidential race to play out in Florida and before the Supreme Court, only in Barack Obama’s two victories has AP declared a White House winner before midnight Eastern Time. Trump didn’t win until 2:29 a.m. ET in 2016 and he didn’t lose in 2020 until the Saturday morning after Election Day — that’s how long it took for Biden to claim 270 electoral votes by emerging as the clear winner in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the sheer number of U.S. Representatives from California — a state where officials will be counting mail ballots for weeks — could make for a long wait to know which party will control the House. The election for Speaker? That’s a whole other matter.

There’s no universal pattern in Michigan for when counties report their mail ballots. That often makes geography a better indicator of the direction of a race than vote type.

The key to a close race in Michigan is to wait for Wayne, Oakland, and Washtenaw counties to release significant batches of votes before jumping to any conclusions. Wayne includes Detroit, while Oakland is made up of the city’s northern suburbs. Washtenaw County is home to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.

Michigan doesn’t permit absentee ballots to be counted until the morning of Election Day and warns on its elections website that high numbers of absentee ballots usually prolongs the counting process by hours if not days.

Here’s the thing about recounts: They might be required by law, they might be requested by a candidate, they might be ordered by a court. But they’re not very likely to do anything but drag out the inevitable. “Recounts are shifting a very small number of votes,” said Deb Otis of the nonpartisan organization Fair Vote. “We’re going to see recounts in 2024 that are not going to change the outcome.” They almost never do. In the 36 recounts of a statewide general election since America’s most famous recount in 2000, none moved the margin by more than a few hundred votes. The average change? Just 0.03 percentage points. The biggest? A move of 0.11 points in the 2006 race for Vermont state auditor – a rare race that did flip as a 137-vote lead in the initial count for Republican Randy Brock became a 102-vote recount win by Democrat Thomas Salmon. “The count is pretty accurate because the machines work,” said former Arizona election official Tammy Patrick. “We have recounts … to make sure we got it right.” As hopeful trailing candidates will soon learn, the first count almost always is.

There have been 36 recounts in statewide general elections since America’s most famous recount in 2000. That year, Republican George W. Bush maintained his lead over Democrat Al Gore in Florida — and won the presidency — after a recount was stopped by the Supreme Court.

Since then, only three of those statewide recounts resulted in a new winner, and all three were decided by hundreds of votes, not thousands. That’s according to an Associated Press review of statewide recounts using data from the AP vote count, state election offices and research by FairVote, a nonpartisan organization that researches elections and advocates for changes in the way elections are conducted.

Most states allow recounts when the margin between the top candidates falls within a specific margin, such as 0.5 percentage points, even when that means the number of votes separating them is actually in the thousands or even tens of thousands. But there is no precedent for a recount changing the winner in a race with margins that big, at least not since Congress made sweeping changes to U.S. election law in 2002.

The most recent statewide race overturned by a recount was in 2008 in Minnesota. Republican Sen. Norm Coleman led Democrat Al Franken by 215 votes in the initial count, out of more than 2.9 million ballots cast. After a hand recount, Franken won by 225 votes, a shift of 0.02 percentage points, or two one-hundredths of a percentage point.

Among the 36 statewide recounts since 2000, the average change in the winning margin, whether it grew or shrank, was 0.03 percentage points. The biggest shift was 0.11 percentage points in a relatively low turnout race for Vermont auditor in 2006. In that race, incumbent Republican Randy Brock led Democrat Thomas Salmon by 137 votes after the initial count. A recount flipped the race and Salmon won by 102 votes.

There are even more recounts in downballot races that are sometimes decided by a handful of votes. But even in these lower turnout elections, recounts rarely change the winners.

“Recounts are shifting a very small number of votes,” said Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote. “We’re going to see recounts in 2024 that are not going to change the outcome.”

States have a wide variety of laws on when and how recounts are conducted. Many states have automatic recounts if the margin between the top two candidates is within a certain margin. The most common margin is 0.5 percentage points, but there is a lot of variation. Some states allow candidates to request recounts but require that they pay for them — unless the winner changes.

Alaska, Montana, South Dakota and Texas mandate recounts only if there is an exact tie, though candidates in those states can request a recount. South Carolina has automatic recounts if the margin between the top two candidates is 1% or less of the total votes cast in the race.