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You did everything right: You voted early, putting that absentee ballot in the mail or dropping it in a local drop box to ensure your vote was counted.
Then your candidate dropped out.
What on earth are you supposed to do now?
Many Michigan voters may be asking that question this month after Democratic Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Cox both suspended their campaigns. Mail ballots for the Aug. 4 primary have been available since late June, so there are almost certainly McMorrow and Cox supporters who have already voted.
If you’re one of those people, all is not lost. Michigan law gives you the right to cancel (or, in legal parlance, spoil) your ballot and cast a new one. You don’t even need to give a reason why — so it doesn’t matter if it’s because your candidate dropped out or because you realized too late there was some other problem with your ballot.
How to spoil your ballot depends on whether you’ve already submitted it.
If so, you’ll need to sign and submit a written request to your township or city clerk (not your county clerk!) by the end of the day on Friday, July 24. That’s the day your request needs to be received by the clerk — not the day it needs to be postmarked.
That date may seem kind of early, but it makes sense when you consider other parts of Michigan election law. Statewide early voting begins Saturday, July 25. And communities with more than 5,000 people are allowed to start preprocessing absentee ballots eight days before the election, which for the primary is Monday, July 27. Preprocessing allows for everything but the actual counting of the votes — taking in the ballots, verifying signatures, opening the envelopes, and even putting ballots in the tabulator, which will eventually scan and count them.
As soon as your absentee ballot is removed from its envelope, it is no longer tied to you, so it can’t be taken back or changed. Clerks largely appreciate the option to process ballots before Election Day, because it means faster results, but it does limit your window to request a new ballot.
If you’ve already filled out your ballot but not yet turned it in, you have a few more options. You can go in person to an early voting location or to your polling place on Election Day and surrender your absentee ballot, at which point election workers will spoil it and give you a new one to vote there and then.
Alternatively, you can go to your local clerk’s office and fill out the same written, signed request to spoil your unsubmitted absentee ballot and get a new one.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.
