The old joke is: Vote early and vote often.
In 2020, it's more than a joke.
Voters in Genesee County received more than 7,000 absentee ballots over the past several weeks, and with elections that would normally be on different days consolidated into a single day, both Republicans and Democrats have multiple ballots to cast.
The turnout at local polling places today, said Dick Siebert, Republican election commissioner, has been light. That is likely due to all those voters who requested absentee ballots.
Siebert doesn't have a count on how many ballots have been returned so far, but while some in politics have expressed concern about the prospect of voter fraud from mail-in ballots, Siebert said there is no indication of fraud in Genesee County.
"I hear that nationally there have been reports in other counties, but not in Genesee County, of one person or one group asking for 350 ballots," Siebert said. "We don't have that problem in Genesee County. No representative or candidate has asked for as many as 15 or 20 ballots."
The potential problem with absentee ballots, Siebert said, is that there is no opportunity to check an ID of a voter the way polling workers could for a person voting at a designated polling place. That doesn't mean there isn't a way to help protect against voter fraud with absentee ballots but it's a lot more work, Siebert said.
Workers must pull the registration card for every voter who submits an absentee ballot and check the signature at the time of registration against the signature on the envelope containing the ballot.
For this election, even with an anticipated turnout of the more than the 25 to 30 percent that might be typical, it's going to take county staff some time to sort through all those ballots before they can be counted.
Siebert is worried about the general election in November when turnout is expected to top 80 percent. If the pandemic is still raging and people must still maintain social distances the number of absentee ballots to be verified and counted would be well beyond anything local officials ever had to deal with before.
"That would be a disaster," Siebert said. "The workload, the time it would take, if the same thing happens in the fall, we're going to be overwhelmed."
As it is, residents should not expect final election results tonight. This evening, results for today's in-person voting will be released after polls close at 9 p.m. but the absentee ballot count won't be finished until July.
If you haven't voted yet and go to a polling place today, masks are required.
Also, if you haven't dropped your absentee ballot in the mail yet, it's too late; however, you can drop it off at your neighborhood polling location.
