August 27, 2010 (Issue 501)

Candidate Rotation - Absent Voter Counting Boards: Michigan election law, MCL 168.569a, stipulates that candidate names must be rotated on the ballot in specified instances to eliminate the chance that a candidate may be unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged in an election by his or her position on the ballot. When rotations are required, the candidate names are rotated from one precinct to the next. 

As a cost saving measure, when preparing absentee ballots, it is recommended that the ballot rotation(s) established for each precinct be applied to the absentee ballots that will be used at a primary or election regardless of whether the absentee ballots will be processed in a precinct or absent voter counting board precinct.  This means that all voters who apply for an absentee voter ballot will receive a ballot that is identical to the ballot issued at the polls on Election Day.

This rotation process will permit a number of different configurations of absent voter counting boards.  For example, you may establish a single absent voter counting board for each regular precinct or a number of ballot styles may be combined into a single absent voter counting board as the tabulator programming can handle more than a single ballot style.

What you cannot do is combine the absent voter counting board vote totals into the corresponding precinct totals.  The only way this can be done is to send the absent voter ballots to the precinct to be processed and tabulated on Election Day.

Additional information regarding this issue will be forwarded next week.