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Thanks to stubborn lawmakers, Michiganians still will find it hard to vote

The Blade

Thanks to stubborn lawmakers, Michiganians still will find it hard to vote

LANSING — If you ask politicians in Michigan’s government about voting, they will tell you it is a right and a sacred duty. They will say that they want everyone to vote, in every election.

But a lot of them are lying.

State Sen. Dave Robertson, a Republican from the Flint area, proved that this month. He opposes making it easier for Michiganians to vote, and is determined to stop any effort to allow them to do so without a hearing. And as chairman of the Senate elections and government reform committee, he may have enough power to succeed.

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Michigan makes it harder to vote than most other states, which either allow early voting, allow any voter who wants an absentee ballot to get one, or allow both. While Ohio and Indiana open their polls and voting booths in the days leading up to an election, Michigan refuses to consider that.

Michigan limits absentee ballots to voters over age 60, those who are in physical need of help in voting, those who swear they are going to be out of town or working as elections inspectors away from home, or those who are in jail on Election Day.

Democrats long have charged that Republicans don’t want to expand voter turnout. Statistics tend to show that GOP voters are more likely to get themselves to the polls.

For many people — mothers of small children, workers on jobs that allow only limited time off — waiting in line to vote on Election Day is a difficult or impossible burden. According to Sharon Dolente, the head of the nonprofit Michigan Election Coalition, the average Michigan voter waited in line for 20 minutes to vote in the 2012 presidential election, compared with five minutes in California. In Michigan’s crowded, urban, and poor areas, that delay sometimes stretched to four to five hours, discouraging many people from voting.

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Two prominent Republican women have taken the initiative to do something about that. State Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons introduced legislation that would allow absentee voting for any voter who could produce proper identification.

“We should give all voters a convenient way to have their voices heard on Election Day,” said Ms. Lyons, the daughter of former Michigan Lt. Gov. Dick Posthumus.

Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, the state’s chief elections officer, promptly endorsed the bill. She has supported no-reason absentee voting for years.

But Mr. Robertson, the first GOP senator elected from normally Democratic Genesee County in decades, contemptuously said to forget about it. Worse, he said he would not even conduct hearings on such a bill, should the House pass it and send it to the Senate.

He did not state the obvious: He wants to do everything possible to prevent more people from voting. Instead, he made the absurd claim that allowing more people to get absentee ballots a few weeks before elections would unfairly deprive candidates of the time they need to make their case to the voters.

It is impossible to take any of Mr. Robertson’s claims seriously, given that he refuses to hear testimony that undoubtedly would show that no-reason absentee ballots have worked well everywhere they’ve been tried.

But he has a powerful ally: Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, who frequently has signaled his contempt for increasing either voter participation or knowledge about government. This entire episode has a sense of deja vu about it.

Two years ago, Secretary Johnson proposed a new rule that would have required “issue-oriented” advertising to disclose the source of its funding under campaign finance reporting requirements. Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case in 2010 that essentially there can be no limits on campaign funding, it also ruled states could require disclosure.

But Mr. Meekhof immediately slammed through a bill to sabotage Ms. Johnson’s efforts and prevent disclosure. It narrowly passed both houses, and Gov. Rick Snyder signed it into law. Such ads now account for most spending in Michigan Supreme Court races, and are largely used to smear candidates.

Barring vast citizen pressure on lawmakers, it appears that efforts to increase access to absentee ballots may be doomed. People will continue to find it harder to vote in Michigan than in most other states.

And that suits a lot of people who pretend to support democracy just fine.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade’s ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com

First Published June 26, 2015, 4:00 a.m.

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