Michigan GOP walks fine line on absentee voting, as Trump sends mixed messages

• Absentee ballots will be mailed next week to Michigan voters, and could be crucial to deciding the election
• Republicans in Michigan are working overcome mistrust of mail-in voting even as Donald Trump continues to sow doubt about the practice 
• Democrats may have an edge in ensuring supporters return absentee ballots

In February, Donald Trump was unequivocal about absentee voting, telling supporters at a Waterford Township rally that it is “totally corrupt” and should be eliminated to “secure our elections.”

Months later, a rally at Grand Rapids’ Van Andel Arena, featured a video of him telling supporters that “absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options.” 

Trump has since sent mixed messages. He has asked supporters to vote through whatever method they chose, but also told a crowd last month in Pennsylvania that  “we want to get rid of mail-in voting.”

His about-face mirrors that of the Republican Party, which is making a push to encourage absentee voting while also suing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over her guidance to local clerks about the ballots.

It’s a delicate two-step perhaps made more difficult by Republicans’ own mistrust of mail-in voting, hardened by years of Trump’s rhetoric and false claims of widespread electoral fraud in 2020.

“We will be out, actively encouraging people to go vote early,” Michigan Republican Party chair Pete Hoekstra told Bridge Michigan. 

“Voters will make up their own minds on which process that they're going to use … We want people to know what their options are for voting, when they can vote and knowing that we want them to bank their vote as soon as possible.”

Local clerks are set to begin mailing absentee ballots on Thursday. Some observers say Trump’s continued venting about them could backfire in what’s expected to be a close election. 

“It poses a huge challenge for his campaign,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“The election professionals at his campaign and at the (Republican National Committee) recognize this,” and are promoting early voting, Becker said. 

“But (Trump) continues to spread lies about mail voting and even early voting in some cases, and it's likely that his supporters, to some degree, are embracing those lies.”

Losing a ‘good tool’?

In 2020, now-President Joe Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes in an election with record-high turnout. Fueled by the pandemic, 3.3 million of 5.5 million votes were cast absentee.

Conventional wisdom (which is now disputed) has long held that higher turnout favors Democrats. In Michigan, there are more voting options than 2020, because of a series of ballot proposals and legislation from Democrats.

Voters can sign up once to receive an absentee ballot in every election, or stop by an early voting site nine days or more before the election to cast a vote in person.

Michigan Democrats have leaned into the new opportunities: In 2022, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer outperformed her GOP challenger among absentee voters even in conservative counties such as Monroe.

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“I suspect it has been disadvantageous to the Republicans, because they are taking a good tool away from their voters” by bad-mouthing early voting, Michigan Democratic Party chair Lavora Barnes told Bridge. 

“I think that because they have done that, they have ceded some ground here that we have not.”

Nationwide, the National Republican Committee has filed a host of suits over voting procedures, including five in Michigan. The most recent was this month over how local clerks should process and verify absentee ballots.

Republican suits have successfully struck down administrative guidance on ballot signatures, while one is pending suit over using government buildings as voter registration sites.

A spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State said another suit attacking the labels affixed to absentee ballots “was about getting a headline that causes voters to doubt the integrity of our election processes,” along with “an abuse of our judicial system and a waste of all our time.”

The lawsuits, said a GOP and Trump campaign spokesperson, represent “actionable things we've done in Michigan to increase confidence in the election.”

Ballot chasing science

After absentee ballots are mailed on Sept. 26, a crucial period begins for both parties of what is known as  “ballot chasing.”

That is the process of contacting absentee voters to ensure they fill out and return their ballots. 

It’s a precise science, and a lot is at stake.  In 2020 alone, nearly 480,000 absentee ballots in Michigan went unreturned — a tally that conceivably could have changed the outcome of the election, according to data from the U.S. Elections Project.

While it’s public record which voters requested a mail-in ballot and if they’re turned it in, voting records and party affiliations remain private. Ballot chasers rely on advanced statistical models to target likely supporters.

Educating voters about how to vote early and then ensuring they do so early has been a cornerstone of Democrats’ get-out--the-vote efforts for years and has evolved along with the laws, Barnes told Bridge.

This election, their work has involved “hundreds of thousands of phone calls and other outreach to make sure our folks are participating and getting good information about how that process works,” Barnes said. 

About 40,000 volunteers have already served a shift doing voter outreach, she noted. 

Both parties share the same strategy: persuade reliable supporters to vote as early as possible, then focus on the small slices of the electorate pivotal in a battleground state like Michigan.

Republican Party officials told Bridge the party is doing more to reach voters than past two elections, citing a program called Trump Force 47 that has 93 activities planned in the next month.

Some Republicans say the party’s voter outreach efforts are falling short. 

“There's no evidence to suggest that there are the offices, the personnel, the resources in place to effectively get out the vote and run up the score in the reddest of red counties, to offset the guaranteed margins that Kamala Harris and Democrats will have” in Michigan’s biggest cities, Republican consultant Dennis Lennox told Bridge.

Lennox is based in northern Michigan. He said he is a regular voter but has not received campaign mail from Republicans, even though they have sent it to fellow northern Michigan resident Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat and U.S. transportation secretary.

“It’s political malpractice,” he said.

Michigan Republican Party officials countered they have volunteers in all 83 counties, and they noted Hoekstra only took over as party chair in January, inheriting a state party that was effectively broke. 

They said Lennox has had no involvement with the party or campaigns.

The party will be able to lean on some outside groups to pick up slack such as Turning Point Action, a conservative advocacy group that is hiring paid canvassers to chase ballots.

"If we just do a little bit, just a tiny little fraction of what (Democrats have) done in a strategic and smart and effective way, it makes it really hard (for them to win.),” said Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of Turning Point Action. 

“If the polls are saying it's even within 2 or 3 points, then … everything's winnable, because chasing 3% of them is really plausible. It's only chasing 150,000 to 200,000 votes.”

The conspiratorial specter 

Even as Trump continues to falsely insist he won the 2020 election, Michigan Republican Party leaders are largely turning the page on voter fraud claims.

In a recent press call with the Defend Democracy Project, MIGOP general counsel Mike Bishop joined a bipartisan group of former Michigan leaders to speak about the importance of protecting the democratic process.

“Relitigating past elections is not something that is a common belief or desire of other members of the Republican Party,” said Bishop, a former U.S. representative from Oakland County.

Not all Republicans are on board.

Kristina Karamo, the ousted former chair of the state party, excoriated Bishop in an email, accusing him of “using his role as MIGOP general counsel to suppress efforts to remedy the greatest threat to national survival — that is systemic election corruption.”

Low confidence in Michigan’s elections had rebounded somewhat since the 2020 election, shortly after which an MIT Election Lab survey found just 22% of Republicans were confident in the accuracy of the state’s vote count. 

In a Marist College poll released Sept. 19, confidence the government would run a “fair and accurate” election in November had increased to 49% among Republicans. That’s compared to 96% of Democrats and 66% of Independents who felt the same way.

In 2016 by comparison, 83% of Michigan Republicans were confident in Trump’s 11,000-vote victory, along with 68% of Democrats.

Support for voting early without a specific reason has also fallen among Republicans nationwide. It dropped 20 percentage points from 2018 to 2024, according to a Pew Research Center survey, to just 37%.

The Atlantic magazine reported in July that Trump has ordered the Republican National Committee to dismantle its get-out-the-vote field program and instead divert the resources to election integrity efforts.

Matt DePerno rose to prominence — and is facing criminal charges — for his unsuccessful attempts to find evidence of widespread voter fraud after the 2020 election, illustrated the tightrope Republicans are walking in an interview earlier this year.

DePerno told Bridge “I have to believe,” the 2024 election results would be trustworthy, “because I have faith and believe in our system.” 

But he also hedged his response with a caveat: “There were a lot of problems in 2020 and I think those issues should have been more properly vetted by the court system.” DePerno’s appeals on the matter were denied by the Michigan Supreme Court.

It’s not clear that those efforts bolstered early voting participation as satisfied activists who feel the election system is deeply corrupt. 

At a Trump rally in Flint, Sept. 17, two tables in the arena’s entrance hall were lined with appeals and resources to vote early. 

While volunteers recruiting poll challengers and canvassers were well-attended, in the span of 15 minutes, only Justin Johnson, a 27 year-old from Grand Blanc, stopped by the unattended early voting table. 

The conservative podcasts he listens to had convinced him it’d be a safer bet.

“I still do not trust day-of, or even mail-in, but with them saying to do it early by mail-in again, because there could be something as far as a cyberattack happens on the day of (the election),” Johnson said. “Who knows what's going to happen?”