Black Detroiters want vote to count

Michigan doesn’t have “early voting” but absentee ballots can be requested by mail, or picked up at the Elections Commission and even filled out on the spot. On Oct. 27, a city worker went to pick up his ballot but was unable to do so because of a three-hour wait.

A week earlier my friend went to pick up his ballot and reported that instead of people coming to the front counter as has been the practice experienced by me in previous elections, the Elections Commission had opened up a garage area to serve the huge number of voters who were coming in to vote absentee.

On Oct. 30, I went to pick up my absentee ballot; it took two hours. There was a line out the front of the building where people picked up the application to vote absentee and a pen, then they went into the next room where they took a number from a machine, then stood outside the entry to a large garage room until there was seating space.

At least 100 people filled the chairs quietly waiting for their number to be called to go to a bank of clerks at laptop computers on one side of the garage where they were asked for ID and received their ballots. There was a break about 1:30 when there was no longer a line outside, but the chairs were refilled by a steady stream of voters coming in.

So for at least two weeks hundreds of voters have voted absentee every day—this is in addition to people who requested that absentee ballots be mailed to their homes. I wish I had taken a picture. One man waiting said he brought his son, a young voter, because the younger man might not have had the patience to wait and he wanted to make sure his son voted. Detroit Elections Director Daniel Baxter told the Detroit Press that over 77,000 people have asked for absentee ballots, compared with 68,000 in 2004.

This week I spoke with a contractor who is a white Kucinich liberal. He told the story of his brother and sister-in-law, who were working on the Obama campaign in Ann Arbor, where there wasn’t a lot of work to do. The brother told of approaching his wife saying he had a “crazy idea” and he hoped she would talk him out of it. He wanted to go to Indiana for three days, on the weekend and Monday, to campaign for Obama. She told him she had been trying to figure out how to tell him that she had the same idea. So they were going to Indiana to campaign.

LaBash is a retired Detroit city worker.