- As more voters use absentee ballots, Grand Rapids officials are considering a plan to redraw the city’s voting map, shrinking the number of precincts.
- Some residents are worried that chopping up and combining existing precincts will disenfranchise voters, particularly in the city’s third ward.
- A Michigan Public analysis of the proposed changes found the distance between polling places and farthest edges of most precincts would shorten or remain roughly similar. Some would increase slightly.
- Grand Rapids is one of several municipalities in Michigan making moves to consolidate and eliminate precinct locations.
Grand Rapids – home to nearly 200,000 people – grew by almost 6% between 2010 and 2020. But alongside that growth, a quieter trend has emerged: a decline in the number of polling places.
Today the state’s second-largest city is divided into 74 voting precincts, with several sharing polling locations. Grand Rapids City Clerk Joel Hondorp said that’s a nearly 25% drop in precincts since the late 1950s — though the city has about 20,000 more people now. And more changes are on the horizon.
For next year’s midterm election, the number of precincts might shrink to 59, each with its own polling place. That’s as city leaders are weighing a proposal that would chop up and combine existing precincts into new shapes. Many of the existing voting locations will continue to be used, but eight are being eliminated and three new locations are being added – a plan that could reshape how thousands of residents cast their ballots.
Grand Rapids is one of several cities and counties where this is happening. Since the state Legislature approved increasing the number of allowable voters per precinct from 2,999 to 5,000 in 2023, dozens of cities and counties across Michigan have moved to consolidate and eliminate precinct locations, including Flint and Ferndale.
Grand Rapids election officials say the proposed precinct consolidations are driven by declining in-person turnout and efforts to reduce costs.
Fewer people vote on Election Day
The plan, Hondorp said, has been in the works since before 2023, but he wanted to wait until after the 2024 elections to make any changes, saying he wanted to see more data on residents voting.
“What if no one chose to use early voting and we made all these changes and then we had huge lines in November of 2024? I wasn't willing to take that risk. That would be detrimental to the system,” Hondorp said.
This last presidential election, of those who voted in Grand Rapids, 36% voted by mail, 21% headed to the polls during the nine-day period of early voting, and 43% voted on Election Day at their assigned precinct location. In-person voting was down by half compared to 2016. Between 2020 and 2024, the introduction of early voting also contributed to a reduction in the number of people voting at their precinct on Election Day.
Hondorp said the numbers demonstrate a need to reallocate resources.
“Michigan is in year eight of our election equipment that we put into place in 2017 and so in the next few years, that election equipment is going to have to be replaced, and each precinct is anywhere from $7,500 to $10,000,” he explained. “So that could be a cost of $150,000 there in future costs, plus maintenance and other things that go along with it.”
If the proposal to reduce polling locations moves forward, Hondorp estimates the city could save about $20,000 per election.
Concerns over ballot access
Grand Rapids City Commissioner Kelsey Perdue doesn’t think the changes are worth the money. At a city meeting last week, Perdue was the only member to vote against the proposal. She also pushed for an amendment that would have allowed some precincts to consolidate without eliminating any polling locations.
“Proximity to polling places matters,” she said. “It increases turnout, especially for full-time [workers] or first-time voters, so we are not in a time where we should even risk making it any harder for anyone in our community to vote, and we really should seek to be a place where we maintain equal access.”
Perdue, who represents the city’s Third Ward, is concerned that the proposed changes could disenfranchise voters in her area – home to some of the city’s largest Black and Latino communities.
Perdue said while the changes enhance access to some voters in Grand Rapids, they also might make it harder for others.
She said she could support closing a polling site if, for example, "it shares a location with another precinct,” but that’s not the case for some of the planned closures.
She referred specifically to Adams Park Apartments, an affordable housing complex on the southeast side of Grand Rapids with a short trip to a polling place.
“If there are still residents living there [this upcoming election] this is still a way for them to easily access their voting booth, so their voting precinct should remain there,” Perdue said.
On the other hand, the other third ward commissioner, Marshall Kilgore, said he thinks the changes are going to make it easier for people to vote in Grand Rapids.
“With these proposed changes, we’re not going to make people wait in long lines,” he said. “I believe this election commission and my colleagues are giving the public something that is nuanced, well thought out and considered with the goal in mind of making it easier to vote.”
According to city election officials, the largest precinct in the proposed maps would fall in the second ward. It would have 3,800 registered voters. Currently the largest precinct is in the first ward with nearly 3,400 voters.
Like Perdue, Third Ward resident Angela Eick is worried about the impact on accessibility for her neighbors. On Election Day, Eick likes to go vote in person at her precinct, which she said happens to be about a six minute walk from her home. Under the new proposal to shrink the number of precincts, her voting location would remain the same. But she acknowledged that wouldn’t be the case for everyone, and she said recent efforts to require voters to provide more documentation of their eligibility make her nervous.
"At a time when voting rights seem to be under attack or in jeopardy at both the federal and state level, this is a bad time to reduce the number of precincts in the second largest city in our state,” Eick said. “I think from an optics standpoint, it's not great.”
Studies have shown that consolidating and eliminating polling places can sometimes lead to decreased voter turnout — particularly among Black and Latino communities, which already face a range of structural barriers to voting nationwide.
In the case of Grand Rapids, some voter rights advocates argue the changes are not disproportionately impacting communities of color. Ashiya Brown, director of Michigan’s chapter of the group All Voting is Local, which seeks to remove discriminatory barriers to the ballot, and has been working closely with the ACLU of Michigan to monitor the city’s election efforts around the new precinct proposal.
“It can sound like they’re closing polling locations, they’re disenfranchising voters,” she said, but in Grand Rapids, “in some situations you can literally see both polling from locations [the one that is closing and the one new proposed one] from one location,” Brown added.
That’s the case for the precinct located at the Adams Apartment Complex.
Mapping the proposed changes
A Michigan Public analysis compared the maximum distances in a straight line from polling places to the furthest edge of their corresponding precinct for the current and proposed maps.
Most proposed precincts would actually have shorter or very similar maximum distances compared to the existing precincts they would replace. Only a few might see more meaningful but still small increases, likely under a mile as the crow flies.
Under the current maps, the farthest distance a voter would have to travel by road in any precinct is about three miles. That ward two precinct would remain exactly the same under the proposed changes — and would still have the largest travel distance.
The farthest distance a voter in any proposed precinct in wards one or three would have to travel by road is less than two and a half miles.
Most proposed precincts in ward three would have shorter maximum distances than their existing counterparts, while more of ward one’s precincts would have longer distances.
Those distances could matter for ensuring people are able to vote — but they’re only part of a broader shift in how Michiganders cast their ballots.
The way people vote in the state has changed — and it’s not by chance. These shifts can be traced back to two voter-approved ballot proposals in 2018 and 2022. One expanded access to absentee voting, while the other guaranteed the option to vote early and in person for at least nine days before statewide and federal elections.
While Brown applauds these measures, she said they have also created unique challenges for clerks especially when it comes to staffing during early voting days.
“So you need to staff individuals for a longer period of time. But also historically there has been mostly older generations that work the polls, and because now we use technology that is more advanced it’s helpful to have individuals that are more tech savvy than some older folks tend to be,” she said.
Even though the proposal has garnered support from the majority of the Grand Rapids city commissioners, some residents say the process to change precinct locations is lacking transparency.
First Ward resident Russell Olmsted would be affected by the proposed changes. His precinct location would merge with another precinct so the location where he would vote would change. Even though he’s not expected to travel a greater distance to his new location, he worries that might not be the case for everyone.
“There hasn’t been any data presented by the city that was based on interaction with the voting public to see what they desire,” he said. “Is it a matter of distance traveled that's important or are there other factors that are going to be more important to them?”
Olmsted said he’s also confused on how much savings the proposed changes will amount to be.
“They aren’t saying how much it’s going to cost the city to educate people and engage people through the process of these new mergers,” he added. “I think that's a factor that needs to be thought about if we’re going to be talking about cost savings.”
Olmsted said he’s not necessarily against the proposal, but that he would like to see the city take a step to clarify what it would mean and offer opportunities for residents like himself to ask questions.
Next Tuesday, April 29, the Grand Rapids Commission is expected to vote on the proposal to consolidate nine precinct locations and eliminate eight. Commissioners also have the option to delay the vote.
Michigan Public’s Adam Yahya Rayes contributed geographic analysis to this story.
