LANSING – Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer on Thursday announced plans alongside other Senate Democrats to bring major reforms to how Michigan’s elections are run after what they called a “politicization” of the secretary of state’s office and the fact that people had complained of waiting in line for hours to cast their vote earlier this week.
“We’ve seen throughout our secretary of state’s tenure that she is far more focused on playing politics than she is on ensuring our elections were being run properly,” Whitmer (D-East Lansing) said in a statement of Secretary of State Ruth Johnson.
“It is unacceptable to force people to wait in line for hours to exercise their right to vote and the process we’ll begin today will not only remove the partisan politics from that office, but will modernize our system of elections across the board to ensure each and every voter can quickly and securely cast their ballots,” she said.
Though no legislation has officially been drafted, there are certainly plans to do so. Among the issues the minority leader is hoping to address: eliminating the position of secretary of state as a partisan elected official and re-establishing the election and motor vehicle duties of the office under existing state departments; establishing early voting and no-reason absentee voting opportunities similar to other states; improving the training of election inspections; and exploring modern and secure methods of voting such as online or mobile voting.
“It’s become clear over the last couple of years that the position is being misused by the secretary of state,” Bob McCann, Whitmer’s spokesperson, said in an interview. “(Ruth Johnson has) used it as a platform to spout party talking points rather than ensuring elections are run fair.”
McCann pointed to receiving many calls about the extensive waits at polling places on Tuesday while Johnson was campaigning for Republican candidate Mitt Romney, he said.
“What we’re suggesting is that regardless of what party you’re in, it doesn’t make sense to have someone in charge of our elections that is a partisan official that may be more focused on the political side of things than the election side of things,” he said.
“The system is broken and it’s time for us to be bold and make the drastic changes to how we run our elections across the country and right here in Michigan,” Ingham County Clerk Mike Bryanton said in a statement. Bryanton represented county clerks across the state in a lawsuit against the secretary of state earlier this year as to whether or not voters should be required to assert that they are United States citizens.
“We are the greatest democracy in the world and it’s unconscionable that anyone should have to stand in line for hours in order to fulfill one of the most fundamental responsibilities to citizenship,” he said. “We have the technology and the ingenuity to fix this, we simply need the will from both parties to make it happen.”
McCann said Whitmer plans to gather multiple clerks and other officials to evaluate their opinions of the flaws in the system before deciding what exactly it will or will not include in the legislation.
“We’re not ready to say these are the solutions. We’re ready to say we’ve got a problem that needs solutions,” McCann said. “It’s not just patch working different things on the existing system; we’re talking about overhauling the entire system. There have been so many things going on that if the secretary of state isn’t going to do her job to fix this, we’ll step in and do our job as legislators to take care of this.”
Republicans have held the secretary of state’s post since 1995, winning five straight elections, often in blowouts.
Gisgie Davila Gendreau dismissed the complaints from Whitmer.
“I have yet to see any ‘significant concerns raised throughout the year about the politicization of the SOS office,'” she said in an email. “The only people I see making political statements about Tuesday’s election work in the Senate minority leader’s office.”
Gendreau said the department undertook considerable effort to prepare for the election.
“We wholeheartedly believe that voters should be able to cast their ballots conveniently and with confidence and that’s why our Bureau of Elections provided training both in person throughout the state and online before the election,” she said. “In fact, the department for the first time offered training videos for the state’s more than 1,500 local clerks who conduct the elections.”
Of the long waits, Gendreau said they appeared to occur in Grand Rapids and Detroit.
“It was a combination of things,” she said. “Some of it was longer ballots with all the statewide and local proposals. We had six communities that had very large double-sided ballots. Detroit had two double-sided ballots. We also had good, strong turnout.”
And to the Democratic criticism that Johnson was campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Election Day instead of overseeing the election, Gendreau said she said she was with her all day and Johnson “was educating the public about what to expect. She was working with local clerks and she was doing media outreach to encourage people to come out.”
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