Michigan ACLU threatens legal action against township that was late to mail out absentee ballots

Filed 1h ago · Via Michigan Advance · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Song of the Volga Boatmen

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Pete Souza · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The ACLU of Michigan has threatened legal action against Tuscarora Township after a deputy clerk posted in a community Facebook group that there's no real deadline for mailing absentee ballots, only for making them available for pickup. State law says otherwise: ballots must go out 40 days before the election, which this year was Sept. 24, and must be mailed immediately once received.

According to the clerk's own now-deleted post, the township got its ballots after the deadline and didn't finish mailing all of them until Oct. 5, six working days late. More than 800 of the township's roughly 3,000 residents are on the permanent absentee list. The ACLU wants a public retraction and a township press release pledging compliance, or it says it will consider suing.

The state's Bureau of Elections says it's looking into it but as of Thursday hadn't even managed to reach anyone in the township. No township official, including the clerk herself, responded to requests for comment.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A clerk's office is a small thing until the week ballots are late, and then it's the only thing anybody in town is talking about. Getting the deadline wrong in a Facebook post is one kind of mistake; mailing the ballots six days past it is a different, more expensive kind. The township's silence since the letter arrived suggests somebody there is hoping this blows over like a bad weather report, but the ACLU does not seem to be the forgetting type.

Source: Read the original at Michigan Advance → Scored: Song of the Volga Boatmen · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0