Joel Hondorp has been Grand Rapids’ City Clerk since April of 2018. He says this year’s election is unlike any he’s presided over before since Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing early in-person voting in November of 2022.
“First of all, it’s early voting. I mean, this is groundbreaking and earth-shattering to have nine days of early voting.”
Hondorp explains that presents a challenge scheduling poll workers and reserving voting locations.
“What church or school can you use for nine days over weekends where they’re not using their facilities? That gets a little interesting on finding facilities in order to do early voting.”
Add to that, early tabulation of absentee ballots.
“And there’s a lot of states that have been doing a lot of this stuff for years and years and years. Michigan is just coming online with that.”
The state does have familiarity with no reason absentee ballots, its popularity growing over the years. In 2016, Grand Rapids had 16,000 absentee voters. In 2020, that number skyrocketed to 60,000.
“We’ve issued 35,000 for this election. I mean, COVID obviously pushed those numbers way up, and now they’re finally coming back down to where we kind of saw them in the midterm as well.”
City officials say 4,350 early in-person ballots were cast on the first weekend alone.
