Color me shocked:
Clerk sends conflicting info on straight-ticket voting
Waterford Township Clerk Sue Camilleri is asking absentee ballot voters to call her office if they are confused after she sent them conflicting instructions regarding their ability to vote straight-ticket.
Federal courts recently suspended a Michigan law that would have banned straight-ticket voting in the state for the first time in 125 years, but Camilleri said her office had already scratched out straight-ticket instructions printed on ballot secrecy sleeves mailed to voters.
Rather than pay for 10,000 new sleeves, the Republican official included a separate set of instructions with ballots she mailed out to voters, telling The Detroit News she hoped to save taxpayers money with the move.
“Some people will be confused by it,” Camilleri acknowledged Tuesday, “and hopefully they have the sense to call us.”
Believe it or not, even though she is herself a Republican, I’m willing to give Ms. Camilleri the benefit of the doubt here. The truth is that it’s the Republican state legislature who caused this confusion and fuss in the first place by trying to kill off straight-ticket voting by passing a law last year that got rid of it, even though a) it’s been around for 120 years without anyone other than GOP officials (not GOP voters, I should note) complaining; b) previous attempts to get rid of it were rejected twice by the public; and c) nearly 50% of Republican voters vote straight-ticket as well, which means they pissed off everyone in the state for no good reason whatsoever.
They crammed this bill through (and GOP Gov. Snyder signed it into law), leading to a lawsuit over the stunt, leading to a back-and-forth court battle, leading to an injunction preventing the law from going into effect until at least the 2018 election. This means that for 2016, at least, Michigan voters WILL BE ALLOWED TO VOTE STRAIGHT-TICKET IF THEY WISH TO.
Unfortunately, just like many of the photo ID battles, the final decision came so late in the summer that the various county/city clerks had to scramble to put together accurate information.
As another example: One voter I spoke with here in Bloomfield Township was so confused by the straight-ticket voting brouhaha that he honestly thought that he HAD to vote straight ticket...he thought that he was LEGALLY REQUIRED to vote *all* Dem or *all* Republican down the entire ballot.
I straightened him out, of course, but multiply that guy by, say, 50,000 other voters state-wide and there’s gonna be chaos/confusion at the polls...just as the MI GOP was hoping for.
So Mazel Tov, Michigan Republicans! You were hoping to gum up the works by suppressing the vote and causing mass confusion...and while you were denied the former, it looks like you succeeded in the latter.