MONROE COUNTY, Michigan — The preprocessing of absentee ballots is already underway for some communities in Michigan.
This comes after a law was passed in 2022 to speed up vote counting, allowing cities in Michigan to begin processing absentee ballots for each Election Day precinct.
"If you have a population of at least 5,000 in your jurisdiction, you can set up an (absent voter) counting board and do preprocessing," Monroe County Clerk Annamarie Osment said. "The preprocessing is allowed to be done eight days before the election."
Osment said the absentee voter counting boards are used in cities and townships with at least a population of 5,000 people to get quicker results on Election Day.
"It won't take as long on Election Day to process all of those absent voter ballots," Osment said. "So hopefully, especially in some of the larger communities in Michigan, they have done their preprocessing so we're not waiting as long to get those results."
This is the first time it's being done in a presidential election.
Osment emphasized that this does not mean votes are already being counted.
"The ballots are actually going into the tabulator, but there are no results that come from that until after 8 p.m. on Election Day," Osment said. "That's when the AV counting boards and early voting boards are closed and the results are tabulated."
Osment said they've had an 18% voter turnout for early voting this year in Monroe County compared to half a percent they had in the August primary.
She said they've sent out nearly 34,000 absentee ballots and have received about 30,000 of them back, but nothing has been counted, only processed.
As for when people can expect to start seeing results, she said that'll likely be an hour and a half after polls close for smaller jurisdictions.
"We will probably still be getting some results into the wee hours of the morning for some of our larger jurisdictions," Osment said.
Osment said for those planning on standing in line to vote on Election Day, the wait time shouldn't be long.