By Nathan Layne
WARREN, Michigan (Reuters) -Officials in the U.S. battleground state of Michigan said they worry that the Democratic-leaning city of Warren could lag behind the rest of the state in reporting the results of Tuesday’s presidential election, raising early doubts about the state’s vote count.
Warren, unlike Detroit and most other cities in Michigan, opted not to take advantage of changes enacted in a 2022 state law allowing for up to eight days of preprocessing of absentee ballots. Instead, the city of 135,000 people will wait until Election Day to verify and tabulate more than 20,000 mail-in ballots.
The potential delay from Warren has worried some Democratic leaders that it could leave the results appearing artificially high for Republican Donald Trump on Tuesday evening, and that the former president would seek to exploit the situation by falsely declaring victory in the state before all votes were in.
“If the state is close at all and we don’t have returns from Warren, which is our third-largest city, it’s going to create all kinds of concerns,” said Mark Brewer, an attorney and the former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. “It’s very, very worrisome.”
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not directly address questions about Warren or Trump’s plans to challenge the results. In a statement, Victoria LaCivita, the Trump campaign’s Michigan spokesperson, criticized Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ record and expressed confidence that Trump would defeat her in the state.
Opinion polls show a tight race between Harris and Trump in Michigan and other battleground states.
The decision not to preprocess absentee ballots was made by Warren City Clerk Sonja Buffa, a nonpartisan elected official. She said in a press release that she believed stretching out the process over several days was inefficient and raised the risk of information on the election being leaked.
State and local officials lobbied Buffa to opt for preprocessing, which was established as an option for clerks but not mandated by the new law. Buffa, who has more than two decades of experience overseeing elections, did not bend.
Last week Buffa asked the Warren City Council to approve $140,000 to purchase a fifth high-speed tabulator to help speed up ballot processing, a sign she wanted to deliver results quickly. She later rescinded that request and said she wanted to instead rent one for $40,000.
Buffa did not respond to requests for comment. Reuters could not establish whether she had been able to rent the tabulator or would have to make do with the four already in the city’s possession.
As of Friday, 27,480 absentee ballots had been requested in Warren and 20,437 returned, according to the Michigan Secretary of State’s website. In 2020 Democratic President Joe Biden beat Trump in Warren with about 55% of the vote.
In Michigan elections are administered by city and town clerks who report their results to the county. For Buffa, that means delivering the records from all her precincts via memory sticks to Anthony Forlini, Macomb County’s clerk.
Forlini, who is a Republican, said in an interview that he was confident Buffa could process her absentee ballots in a timely manner, but was worried she would hold on to her memory sticks until the morning after Election Day, as she did during the August primary. Unlike the other clerks in Macomb, Buffa prefers to turn them in when all her election paperwork is finished, a process that takes hours, Forlini said.
Buffa has not told Forlini or Warren city council members that she will prioritize delivery of the sticks on Tuesday.
“We understand that she, the clerk, is not planning on releasing those sticks until she has all her paperwork done,” said Warren City Council Secretary Mindy Moore, another nonpartisan elected official. “They could be waiting for us – the whole world.”
Detroit, in contrast, started preprocessing its absentee ballots on Monday at a convention hall downtown. Each day hundreds of election workers have been working through about 11,000 ballots, with a goal of leaving only 10,000 mail-in ballots for the city to process on Election Day.
If all goes according to plan, Detroit hopes to avert the kind of delay that led to chaos in 2020, when Trump supporters descended on the convention hall and pounded on windows demanding that the absentee ballot counting be stopped.
Chris Thomas, a former Michigan elections director who is working as an adviser to Detroit’s clerk, said he was worried about how quickly Warren could deliver its results.
“The track record of large jurisdictions counting large volumes of absentee ballots in a compressed, highly stressed environment is not good,” Thomas said. “It’s possible (Warren) will be one of the later, one of the last ones in.”
