Michigan clerks say pre-processing absentee ballots led to faster results

During the 2024 election, Michigan clerks were allowed to pre-process absentee ballots for the first time, meaning they could open the ballot envelopes, verify signatures, and feed ballots into the tabulators before the polls closed on election day. More than 200 cities opted to pre-process their absentee ballots, and in one city, Sterling Heights, election workers were able to handle more than 20,000 ballots by midday on election day.

To assuage concerns around election security, Ada County, Ohio created an online tool called Ballot Verifier that allows users to search every ballot cast in the county since 2022. County officials invited local election skeptics to be the first to test the new tool and received positive feedback on its level of transparency.

Utah has universal vote-by-mail, in which every eligible voter receives a ballot in the mail ahead of elections. Even as other Republican-led states have placed more restrictions on voting by mail, Utah legislators have rejected proposed changes, and roughly three-quarters of likely voters in 2024 say they think the process produces “fair outcomes.”

GARViS, Georgia’s new system for documenting voter records, stores information on roughly 7 million active voters and hundreds of thousands of inactive voters, including their addresses, assigned polling places, sample ballots, and early voting schedules. The George Secretary of State’s Office reports that the new system has helped cut down check-in time on election day from about a minute and a half per voter to about 47 seconds per voter, streamlining the process for both poll workers and residents.

Residents who participated in Michigan’s first year of early in-person voting say they appreciated the shorter lines, the convenience to vote on their own schedules, and the ability to feed their ballots into polling place tabulators themselves. Nearly 4,600 voters cast their ballots early in-person across the state.

To make sure its elections run smoothly, the tiny election staff in one Pennsylvania county coordinates helpers from across the county government's departments, who process mail-in ballots while full-time staff oversee in-person voting. The office also invites the public to observe the election process and weigh in on important decisions, such as what type of voting machines are used.

After being criticized for its signature verification process during the 2020 election, Maricopa County, Arizona instituted additional strategies and safeguards leading up to 2022, including expanded training for election workers, additional signature samples for comparison, and a new audit process for approved signatures. The county saw an increase in the number of bad signatures rejected, with 1800 rejected in 2022 compared to 587 in 2020.

Estonia's e-governance system allows citizens to register for social programs, access health records, and complete most government business digitally. In March 2023, more than half of the country's voters cast their ballots via the internet for the first time.

Virginia’s VRA protects voters from suppression, discrimination, and intimidation and has effectively stopped racial gerrymandering and intimidation. Its pro-voting measures include requiring materials in multiple languages, the provision of accessibility accommodations, and requiring public review of any local level voting changes. The legislation also creates a pathway for Virginians to bring civil lawsuits if a procedure negatively impacts economically disadvantaged communities or communities of color.

Almost half of U.S. states guarantee citizens’ rights to petition for ballot measures, but the coronavirus made gathering signatures in person infeasible. Massachusetts courts allowed electronic signatures, but other states have not approved virtual citizen initiative campaigns. Ballot initiatives allow citizens to advance solutions and enact structural changes without relying on support from elected officials. MA groups used DocuSign to gather 30,000 signatures to get a proposal for ranked choice voting on the ballot. Not all MA groups were able to quickly or successfully pivot to the e-signature process.