Voters in Carrollton Township are receiving absentee ballot envelopes with return labels addressed to the City of Wixom, prompting an “urgent notice” from township officials.
“Due to a printing mishap with our vendor on our Absentee Ballot Envelopes – the Return Address is printed as ‘City of Wixom’ on some of the blue & white envelopes,” according to the notice posted on the Carrollton Township website.
“We assure you that your AV Ballot is from CARROLLTON TOWNSHIP,” it continued. “The inside purple and white envelope is labeled correctly!! You will also see that your BALLOT is for your precinct and you are voting a CARROLLTON TOWNSHIP, SAGINAW COUNTY Ballot!!!”
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Wixom is in Oakland County. Carrollton Township is in Saginaw County.
Clerks across Michigan began sending out absentee ballots to voters on Sept. 26, and those voters have until 8 p.m. on Election Day to return them. About 1.8 million absentee ballots were cast in the 2022 midterms, while that figure was over 3 million in 2020.
While it’s unclear how many absentee ballots from Carrollton Township were misprinted, officials there said the ballots are legitimate, MLive reports.
“We APOLOGIZE for this oversight and assure you that the most important part – your AV Ballots are CORRECT AND VALID!!” the notice read. “It’s ONLY some of the outside blue & white envelopes that have the return address printed incorrectly!! Sorry for the confusion!”
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Carrollton Township isn’t the only municipality experiencing issues with absentee ballots.
In Lansing Township, almost 100 people received the wrong mail-in ballot that would have cost them their votes had a local resident not contacted township officials.
Jerry Ward and his husband told WLNS they discovered something wasn’t right when they sat down to fill out the ballots.
“So we turned it over and we started to look at the ballot and he had different names than I had on mine,” Ward said. “OK, so we’re saying there’s something wrong here.”
The two discovered Ward’s ballot was addressed to Precinct 2, while his husband’s was addressed to Precinct 3.
“So that’s how we figured it out, and once we figured it out, it was just like, well, how can this be right? We live in the same household. How can this be?” Ward said.
Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum blamed the issue on “human error.”
“That employee is no longer working for Lansing Township Clerk’s office, and the clerk is following the guidance we have provided to make sure the voters are notified and a replacement ballot has been sent,” she said.
Byrum told WLNS she’s working with Carrollton Township officials to ensure the 97 people who received the wrong ballot are aware of the mistake before Election Day.
In other places, Michiganders are receiving absentee voter ballot applications from third parties that are raising questions about the integrity of the state’s bloated voter rolls, which are currently at 105% of the state’s voting age population.
Last month, state Rep. Brad Paquette, R-Berrien Springs, told The Midwesterner his mother received an absentee ballot application from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that was sent to his grandmother’s address in Marquette in his mother’s maiden name.
Paquette said his mother hadn’t lived at the address in 45 years, and has been married for 43.
“I looked at the Secretary of State website and she’s still registered there from 45 years ago,” Paquette said, adding his mother now lives in Cass County and is registered to vote there.
Paquette said his mother was visiting her mother in Marquette when she discovered the mail, and they’re now working with county officials to review any voting history associated with the old registration.
“We’ll be curious to see if there’s any activity around that,” he said. “How this is still on the books today in 2024, that’s the big question.”
The absentee ballot application was sent on behalf of Whitmer by “The Voter Project Michigan,” one of numerous advocacy groups working to court voters in 2024.
State law requires nonprofits and partisan groups that distribute the applications to print a legal warning and instructions, and local clerks are required to match the third-party ballots with signatures on file.
“It was prefilled, and all you had to do was sign it and date it,” Paquette said. “From my understanding, it is all just dependent on the signature to verify these things.”
“It’s just pretty alarming to see this. There’s a lot of people concerned about election security,” he said. “The leveraging of the office (of the governor) is pretty concerning to me.”
Paquette believes the dramatic language in the mailers – alleging “there is so much at stake in this election” and “our freedoms are at risk” – may convince ineligible voters to return the applications and cast illegal ballots, pointing to recent polling that shows 28% of Democrats believe America would be better off if Trump was assassinated.
“It makes people pretty concerned,” he said. “Only a misdemeanor is keeping them from filling (the absentee voter application) out.”