Well, it’s happened, the Mids are here. Election Day, officially, is Tuesday, but judging by the crowd we saw at Michigan Public’s recent Issues & Ale event, many of you have already cast your ballots.
Me? I’m old fashioned. I’ll be walking to my polling place tomorrow to stand in line with my neighbors and fill in the bubbles with a city-approved PaperMate Flair felt-tip pen like I’ve been doing for years.
And then all that’ll be left to do is wait for the results to start trickling in. Speaking of which, we got this question, from Kara Gavin:
Michigan began early tabulation for absentee ballots in 2024, which continued in this year’s primary. It may have played a role in getting results out more quickly, but the very close Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate was still too close to call the next morning.
It did make me wonder: What’s going on with delayed election results in the hours, or even days, after polls have closed?
“Never a good scenario,” said Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch, who walked me through the process.
Meisch has been working elections for close to 35 years, and she’s seen some stuff.
She said a big part of waiting on election results is that election workers have administrative work to do: validate ballot totals, seal bags and shut down precincts for the night.
But if it’s 4 a.m. and results still aren’t in, it’s not a good sign.
“That usually means that somebody is off somewhere,” Meisch said.
How it's supposed to work
Before we go too far into the nightmare scenarios, let’s review what happens when everything goes right:
1. Polls close
Most of the state’s polls close at 8 p.m.. A few places in the western U.P. stay open for another hour, because they’re in the Central Time Zone. But even when the polls close, anyone still in line is allowed to vote. And, any absentee ballots dropped by 8 p.m. still have to be collected.
“So we have people that are like stationed there, and they’re off site,” Meisch said. “They’re looking at those. They’re bringing in any last minute absentee votes that they have, and then we’re going ahead and processing that.”
2. Verify the ballot count
Thanks to the pre-processing, there’s probably not much tabulating going on at this point, just a small amount of last-minute ballots. Once all the ballots are fed into the machines, election workers check to make sure they have the right number of ballots cast.
“So if I gave a precinct 500 ballots, they have to tell me what they did with their 500 ballots,” Meisch said.
3. On the road
Best case scenario, the numbers match. Workers then print reports from the tabulators, scoop all the physical ballots from a bin in the machine, seal and deliver everything to the clerk’s office, where results are looked over again.
“We pack everything up and then I have to drive to the county to hand-deliver all of our results,” Meisch said. “So they all are hand-delivered. They do not go through the internet or anything like that.”
That last part is key to remember, if you find yourself getting impatient on election night. Vote totals have to travel physically to the clerk’s office. Electronic results are preserved on disk and delivered in person.
If you see a truck late at night . . .
At an election public accuracy test a few weeks ago in Grand Rapids, I ran into former Governor John Engler who now works with the Democracy Defense Foundation to help improve trust in elections.
He said delivering results physically adds a safeguard to the election. But it also can make things take longer.
“You get a big jurisdiction like Detroit, which is larger, and they’re coming in from all across the city, to a single counting place,” Engler said.
As it gets later into the night, normal activity can sometimes be perceived as suspicious.
“And then somebody will say, ‘Well, I saw a truck pull up,’” Engler said. “Well, if that truck is simply delivering the ballots from a particular precinct or five precincts, then there should be a truck.”
Takeaway: before you post a video to TikTok alleging an election conspiracy, ask yourself, “Should there be a truck?”
How it can go wrong
If all goes well, Meisch said results could come in by 11:30 or midnight. Here are reasons why results might arrive later:
1. Ballot numbers don’t match up
If a polling place doesn’t have the same number of ballots as they do voters, workers have to go over everything again to find where the numbers went wrong.
“So it could be going through all of the secrecy sleeves by hand and looking to see if a ballot was left in one of the secrecy sleeves,” Meisch said. “And I’ve got five workers down there all like going through all of them.”
2. Abandoned ballots
Meisch told me there can be valid reasons the numbers don’t match: say a voter picks up a ballot, gets frustrated and leaves before casting the ballot. Poll workers are trained to note these incidents in a poll book, to help explain any discrepancies down the road.
3. Ballots have to be retabulated
With millions of votes being cast in hundreds of communities, mistakes can happen. Usually, if there are any issues, it’s not enough to sway the election. But not always. Just ask the mayor of Hamtramck.
Meisch said if workers can’t resolve any discrepancy with the vote totals, the next step is to set the tabulator back to zero, take every ballot out of the bin below, and run them back through, one by one.
So yeah, if it comes to that, it could be a while.
“Know that we are working,” Meisch said. “We’re working really hard here.”
What about trust?
Kara’s original question asked how the speed of results reporting could affect trust in the outcome. We all remember the 2020 election, when absentee ballots weren’t processed until polls closed, and tabulation stretched for days while conspiracy theories spread online.
But with absentee ballots now being processed earlier, the reality is any delay in reporting is likely because workers are trying extra hard to get the numbers right.
“Counting votes is not a delay in the process, it is the process,” said Kent County clerk Lisa Posthumus Lyons. “But we want it to be transparent, and we want it to be as close to real time as possible.”
That’s why she reports out Kent County results as they come into her office.
“When I have results, I want our public to know what those results are,” Posthumus Lyons said. “So if I don’t have all of them, you’re going to see the results that we do have.”
She doesn’t question that strategy even if it means one candidate is leading early in the evening, only to fall behind when more votes are reported.
Other counties, including Muskegon County, take a different approach, waiting for all the votes to come in before releasing results to the public.
Local clerks told me, in either case, they hear from their own community that they trust the results.
“My residents, I think, have a lot of confidence and a lot of trust in us,” Meisch said.
That trust even came through earlier this year, when President Trump named Muskegon in a speech over voter fraud. It was Meisch herself who discovered the alleged fraud and reported it.
Still she heard about it from people outside of Muskegon.
“The outside people, I can’t speak to them,” Meisch said. “I know that there’s different opinions and feelings about the election, and I definitely have heard from some of them as well.”
When she does, she tries to explain the process, the work that goes into making sure ballots are secured, and that results are reported accurately.
“You know there comes a point that I can’t fix how they feel,” she said. “But I do try.”
Last chance to vote
If you plan to vote on election day, be sure to check in on all of our 2026 Midterm Election coverage. We’ve got interviews with candidates for governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, Michigan Supreme Court and even a useful voter guide to the midterms..
We’ll also have all the results as we get them at michiganpublic.org.
Next time, we’ll wrap up The Mids with final takeaways from the election.
Try to get some sleep,
Dustin Dwyer, Reporter
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Today’s newsletter was written by Dustin Dwyer, produced by Kalloli Bhatt, and edited by Michelle Keller.
