GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Kent County is a highly watched place this election cycle. Once a republican stronghold, Kent County has become more politically purple, narrowing the results between democrat and republican votes.
Lisa Posthumus Lyons, the Kent County Clerk, said prior to Election Day, the county saw about a 44% voter turnout from absentee voting and early voting. She expects at the end of Election Day to have a voter turnout in the low to mid 70 percent range.
In the last few elections, absentee ballot voting has surpassed in-person voting. In the August primary, 58% of ballots cast in the county were absentee. This election the ratio is still to be seen.
“I will say, those absentee numbers really kind of plateaued after early voting started,” said Postumus Lyons. “At the end of this cycle, what we've seen is a drop in absentee voting compared to 2020. 2020 we were in the midst of a pandemic. So, the fact that we issued 227,000 absentee ballots to the, you know, 151,000 this cycle, it's not necessarily surprising, because we don't have the pandemic this year. We do have early voting this year, so it really remains to be seen.”
As of 4 p.m. on Election Day, she said they had a 92% return rate of absentee ballots.
This is the first presidential election cycle where clerks are able to process absentee ballots earlier than Election Day in Michigan. This will be a major help to clerks, who traditionally were not able to even open absentee ballots until Election Day. This will speed up the time to tabulate votes.
“I definitely expect results to come in much quicker than they did, say, four years ago,” said Posthumus Lyons. “I'm very optimistic about that, but when I get results, you'll get results. We're not going to sacrifice accuracy and security for speed, but we're going to do everything we can to make sure we're operating efficiently and accurately.”
Security is top of mind this election season. Posthumus Lyons said they are working with the Kent County Sheriff’s Office for security plans at polling locations. Thousands of election workers are trained and the equipment has been tested.
She said aside from a few small problems Tuesday, such as tabulator issues, things were going smoothly. The tabulator issues were nothing the workers were unable to fix or impacted the ability for citizens to vote.
“Our elections in Michigan are very unique because they're so decentralized, and I think that plays a huge role in the security and the integrity of our elections,” said Posthumus Lyons. “We basically are having 2,000 separate elections going on right now, and then we have so many checks and balances before the election, during voting, and then, actually after today, once all the ballots are cast, there's so many more steps that we take in the process after the election to ensure that the election is secure, it's transparent, it's fair, it's accurate.”