Michigan Freedom Fund President Terri Reid said “taxpayers can rest a little easier today knowing government bureaucrats and lobbyists won’t be spending their tax dollars to bankroll political campaigns or push for local tax hikes”.
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Absentee voters now must be at least 60 years old, be out of town when the polls are open, be an election worker, or be unable to vote on Election Day due to a physical disability, religious tenets or incarceration.
Johnson says she would have liked it if Snyder could have signed the bills together, but she stopped short of criticizing his decision. “The straight-party option saved people time from coloring in all the ovals, but that is only about a third of our voters”.
The new law includes $5 million for additional voting booths and tabulators after clerks raised concerns that removing the option will cause longer lines; but, that also causes concern for some local election officials.
Local clerks estimate the wait time to vote in upcoming elections will double or even triple now that Gov. Rick Snyder has eliminated the option of straight-party voting.
“It’s awful. Gov. Snyder has changed the landscape of campaign finance in the state”, said Rich Robinson, a board member of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, which tracks election spending. “They just want to go in, check the box and get it over with”. Representative Mike McCready of Bloomfield Hills says they had just 15 minutes to go through 41 pages of amendments to the bill before the vote was called the night of December 16.
He added that local governments and schools should still be allowed to distribute “basic information about an election including the proposed or final ballot language and the date of the election”.
Some evidence suggests that Democratic voters use the straight-party voting option more than Republican voters do. It was also pointed out then that the movement to eliminate the straight ticket in MA – during the first half of the 20th century – was led by the Kennedy family.
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Those choosing the no-reason option would have to show ID and request an application in person every election.
