On September 24, the Michigan Bureau of Elections (BOE) issued a critical change in its FOIA disclosure policy. According to a communication sent to organizations receiving absentee voter (AV) data, the BOE will no longer provide certain key data fields essential for election monitoring and audits.
Organizations including CheckMyVote.org and MFE’s Soles to Rolls rely on the transparency of these figures for their election integrity work.
The message from the Secretary of State’s BOE indicated that data related to absentee ballot applications sent and received, as well as ballots returned by voters, will no longer be available under FOIA requests (letter below).
The daily data on ballots returned by voters is crucial not only for election integrity but also for Get Out the Vote (GOTV) activities.
The initiative will be introduced at Stevo’s in Imlay City, with an emphasis on empowering volunteers to monitor absentee ballots.
Without this information, groups working to monitor absentee ballots will have a harder time ensuring that only legitimate ballots are counted.
Despite the challenges posed by the BOE’s new policy, District 9’s ballot tracking team is proceeding with its launch on September 25.
The BOE cites voter privacy as the reason, but the date the application is sent and returned have nothing to do with voter privacy, and these dates are no longer disclosed.
No comments:
Post a Comment