voting

It’s primary Election Day in Michigan.

The races for governor, Congress, and the state Legislature all saw tough and divisive battles among candidates on both sides of the aisle. 

To see how voting is going around the state, we talked to a few of the people on the front lines: county clerks.

Next Tuesday is primary election day in Michigan. That means come Wednesday, it’s time for general election campaigns.

But, how does a candidate actually win? What strategy will get them from primary winner to governor or attorney general or county drain commissioner?

Last week, two more business organizations formally launched challenges to proposals headed for the ballot this November. 

There is just over a month to go before Michigan’s primary elections on August 7th. 

The Pew Research Center recently released a report on midterm voting that found more voters are engaged earlier this election year.

“Compared with recent midterms, more voters say their view of the president – positive or negative – will influence their vote for Congress," the report said. “A 60 percent majority say they consider their midterm vote as essentially a vote either for Donald Trump (26 percent) or against him (34 percent). These are among the highest shares saying their view of the president would be a factor in their vote in any midterm in more than three decades.”

Voters’ rights groups are gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment to make registering to vote easier in Michigan. The “Promote the Vote” campaign is being backed by several groups including the League of Women Voters of Michigan.

For months, a dedicated group of citizens calling themselves Voters, not Politicians, has struggled to come up with a way to give control of drawing legislative districts back to the people. The idea is to ensure fair, sensible and competitive representation to everyone.

That may sound like arcane political science babble, but it is not. Most of us are being effectively denied choices because of gross partisan gerrymandering done to ensure continuous Republican control of government.

"Power to the people."

That slogan so widely used in the 1960s is the driving force behind a push to change the way Michigan draws its legislative and Congressional districts.

The group Voters Not Politicians has firmed up language for a voter petition to put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot for November 2018.

The amendment would overhaul Michigan's redistricting process.

Jocelyn Benson stood in line for two hours waiting to vote last November, holding her five-month-old son Aiden all the while. “I had to put him down and change his diaper twice,” she told me, smiling. Benson lives and votes in Detroit, where there are often too few voting places and machines for large turnout elections.

The Next Idea

When Sandra Stahl works on civic engagement in Detroit, there’s one question she hears again and again.

“Where are all the young people?”

The Michigan School Reform/Redesign Office recently released its latest list of schools that are under-performing. There are 38 schools on this year's list that could be closed, mostly in Detroit. This Week in Michigan Politics, Morning Edition host Doug Tribou and senior news analyst Jack Lessenberry talk about whether Detroit's school district would be able to survive such a large round of closures.

They also discuss what role U.S. Secretary of Education nominee Betsy Devos plays in the state's school closure discussion, concerns over President Donald Trump's order to freeze all grant programs at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a move to bring new voting machines to Michigan.

Hello, my fellow Michiganeers, it’s your friendly neighbor-radio hood Mike Blank. Just in case you’ve been trapped in an abandoned copper mine in the Upper Peninsula since November and you haven’t heard, we’re about to get a new president.

I try not to focus on political issues during our brief time together. However, the one thing that stood out about this election to me was the staggering number of people who did not vote. Roughly 47% of registered voters stayed away from their local school gymnasium, church, or community center on Election Day. And it wasn’t because of the funky smell.

Many Americans were stunned and blindsided by Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

That’s largely because months and months of polls pointed to a defeat of our new president-elect.

Zach Gorchow, editor of Gongwer News Service, joined us today to talk about those polls.

“Polling has a lot of problems. It’s just not able to model the electorate successfully, and that seems to be especially true in Michigan,” Gorchow said. “It just flat out failed to model the African-American turnout correctly, it failed to model the rural turnout correctly."

The late Theodore H. White, the prose poet of our national elections, wrote what remains the most lyrical and magical evocation of the meaning of this day.

“It was invisible, as always. They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do … all of this is invisible, for it is the essence of the act that as it happens, it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, without knowing the shape of the whole.

After a grueling, seemingly endless campaign season, it looks like we might actually make it to the other side of Election Day 2016. This Week in Review, Jack Lessenberry and I round-up some races to watch in Michigan. We also discuss whether there's potential for trouble at the polls and the slew of presidential candidates and surrogates who visited the state this week.