Jessica Mathews / news@whmi.com


Voters decided numerous contested races locally and statewide, along with various proposals in Tuesday’s primary election.

It was a mainly smooth election day and things went well with turnout being a little lower than normal according to Livingston County Clerk Betsy Hundley. That was per conversation shortly before polls closed.

Hundley said all reports from local clerks, along with their election equipment vendor support personnel, was that turnout was a little bit lower than normal. However, she said often times primary turnout is much lower than a general election.

When it comes to the nine-day early voting period, Hundley said it’s still so early in the experience in Michigan that it’s hard to tell the impact – noting it’s only been done in two elections, being the presidential and state primaries. She said they had a little lower turnout for early voting in August than February but again, it’s still too early and they don’t have the statistical data yet to truly analyze where the early-voting voters are coming from.

Hundley said another piece of data they’ll be mining is absentee ballots because Proposal 2 brought about the launch of the permanent absentee voter ballot list and those who submitted applications for all future elections. She said it will be interesting to track how many absentee ballots they send out that are not returned.

As of late Tuesday evening, there was around a 70% return rate for all absentee ballots that were mailed out for this primary election.

Overall, the election day went smoothly with just a couple, very small minor hiccups. Hundley said there was a very short power outage at one of the precincts in Green Oak Township and there was one electronic poll book issue that they had to navigate but other than that, things went quite smoothly in Livingston County. She offered kudos to Green Oak Clerk Mike Sedlak, noting the township invested in some big generators and had one ready to go to the site in no time flat. Hundley said there was also great work by DTE in getting power back on quickly to the precinct.

Hundley said she wishes more people from the public would realize how hard their clerks work to adhere to Michigan’s election laws and really try to run accurate, clean elections in this county - saying “our local clerks are great”.

Hundley noted a lot of work goes into these elections, there’s a lot of stress and they’re under a lot of scrutiny with election administration today. She said they do their best to really adhere to the law and be transparent and explain the process to people - even then they don’t like how it has to be done pursuant to Michigan law.

Meanwhile, the County Board of Canvassers will convene on Thursday morning at 9am in the historic Livingston County Courthouse. Hundley says it will methodically review all of the paperwork generated at each precinct, early voting site, and absentee ballot counting board. She said the public is welcome to attend and they invite people to come watch and see another step in the election process of verifying results.

Results are un-official until the canvassers canvas and certify the election. While the process starts Thursday, Hundley says it will take several days of canvassing to complete their work.

Un-official results can be accessed in the provided link.