LANSING, Mich. — With two weeks to go before the Nov. 3 general election, 789,572 Michigan voters had already turned in a ballot as of Tuesday morning, the Secretary of State’s office reported.
That count equals 10.7% of the state’s active registered voters. Nearly all of it came through absentee ballots: 789,476 returned by mail, drop box or at a clerk’s office, compared with just 96 cast in person at early voting sites.
Demand for mail ballots is running ahead of the last midterm. More than 2.12 million voters have requested an absentee ballot, about 17% more than at the same point in 2022, and roughly 2 million of them are on the permanent mail ballot list.
State election officials are now steering voters away from the post office. Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie urged anyone still holding a ballot to sign and seal it and bring it in person to their clerk, an assigned drop box, an early voting site or their polling place. Ballots must reach clerks by 8 p.m. on Election Day to count.
In-person early voting is about to expand. Starting Saturday, Oct. 24, every early voting location in the state is required to be open, for a minimum of eight hours daily, until Nov. 1. Some communities, including East Lansing and Grand Rapids, opened sooner, and locations may add an optional extra day on Nov. 2.
Every registered Michigan voter is eligible to vote early at a site. The process works like Election Day: voters receive a ballot, fill it out and feed it into the tabulator themselves.
Voters can find their early voting site at mi.gov/earlyvoting and track a mail ballot at mi.gov/trackballot. The state’s voting dashboard posts updated county and local request and return totals daily through the Monday before the election.
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