ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Thousands of ballots from overseas voters will arrive days after the polls close Nov. 5 in crucial swing-state Michigan, threatening to leave the American people with another multi-day nail-biter election.
Americans living abroad have been able to vote in their home states since 1986, but a 2022 amendment to Michigan’s constitution allows these ballots to arrive an entire week after the election and still be counted.
“They now have an additional six days to get that to their local clerk, so long as it was postmarked on or before Election day,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told The Post.
The deadline is even extended 24 hours due to Veterans’ Day, so overseas ballots will be counted as late as Nov. 12.
Even more surprisingly, these voters don’t need to have ever stepped foot in Michigan — or even the United States — to register to vote in the Great Lakes state, thanks to a 2023 election law Gov. Gretchen Whitmer passed.
Per that legislation, “a spouse or dependent of an overseas voter who is a citizen of the United States, is accompanying that overseas voter, and is not a qualified and registered elector anywhere else in the United States, may apply for an absent voter ballot even though the spouse or dependent is not a qualified elector of a city or township of this state.”
With that, Michigan has effectively expanded the definition of an eligible overseas voter, and the state’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has reiterated these new policies in her instructions to election officials.
The GOP challenged that expanded definition with a lawsuit last month, but a Michigan judge dismissed the suit last week for what she called an “11th hour attempt” to disenfranchise voters weeks from Election Day.
Cindy Berry, who oversees elections as a clerk in Chesterfield Township, was a co-plaintiff in the suit. She told The Post the new rules are “in complete conflict with the state law that specifically says that they must have 30 days of residency in the jurisdiction in which they are registering to vote.”
Overseas voters are a significant voting bloc, one that Democrats have invested in significantly this election cycle. The Democratic National Committee estimates there are more than 1.6 million Americans living abroad eligible to vote in swing states this cycle.
An election clerk in the small eastern city of Fraser (population: 15,000) faces only a few.
“I have about 26,” said August Gitschlag.
“I have a little over half of them back. I don’t have any pending. We get them out within minutes of the email coming in. So it’s not an overwhelming amount here,” he told The Post.
Byrum said that Ingham County, with a population of around 285,000, has 947 military or Military/Overseas Voter (MOVE) applications and ballots so far.
Whether or not the late-arriving overseas ballots will affect results in Michigan after Nov. 5 remains to be seen.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the state by fewer than 11,000 votes — a 0.23-point margin.
Although remote, there is a possibility ballots arriving in the week after Election Day could drag out results in the crucial swing state.
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