(Source: MIRS.news, Published 05/15/2024) Legislation requiring the Secretary of State to team up with a public Michigan university to create an expansive election database received a fourth public hearing Wednesday.
The partnership created under SB 402, part of the proposed "Michigan Voting Rights Act" package, would collect data, perform research, conduct classes and seminars, publish books and periodicals and provide technical assistance to local governments, said Erica Peresman, senior advisor at Promote the Vote.
Peresman told the Senate Elections Committee that election experts would be allowed to use the data called for in the bill to assess whether an election was freely and fairly run. They are interested in data, not anecdotes, the former of which the institute would provide.
Committee member Ed McBroom (R-Waucedah Twp.) asked what type of information the database would gather or centralize that isn’t already available through the SOS Michigan Voter Information Center, or MVIC.
Peresman said MVIC displays individual voter information like their polling location, early voting sites and some past election results, but they are not broken down to the precinct level. She said researchers are looking for precinct level data that shows voting age population and citizen voting age population broken down by race, color, language, minority group status, and disability status for every local government such as cities, townships and counties. Researchers also want voter registration lists, voter history files, polling place locations, early voting sites, dropbox locations and precinct boundaries.
“It makes me even that much more uncomfortable,” McBroom said. "It seems very to clear to me then that the onus for this, at least to some serious extent, is to obtain a lot of macro and micro data that then will be a benefit to those who are campaigning and those who are selling election services and all sorts of other things then just like Google and Facebook,” McBroom said.
Chair Jeremy Moss (D-Southfield) said aggregating that data is for researchers to dig deeper into questions about voter turnout disparity, such as why a specific racial group doesn’t have as high of a turnout in one precinct as another.
Sen. Ruth Johnson (R-Holly) raised concern that the partnership is between a university and the Secretary of State, a partisan position. Earlier in committee, Peresman brought up that the data the institute would be interested in is already collected by Michigan’s more than 1,500 city and township clerks, which are also partisan, and the bill would centralize the data and alleviate Freedom of Information Act request fulfillments from clerks’ offices.
As more concerns were brought up, Moss said he would be open to re-examining parts of the package. This is the fourth round of testimony the bills, which are part of a package that would create the Michigan Voting Rights Act (MVRA), have gotten since September.
Moss said California and Connecticut both have databases housed within universities, and Peresman said a professor she spoke with said there is no state better positioned to have one than Michigan.
Johnson questioned why local government clerks weren’t supporting the bill, then, and Moss said he hasn’t seen cards written from those entities directly opposing the bills. Johnson said her characterization of the clerks’ stances was that these bills don’t have their direct support, which is a cause for questions.
The panel also talked about, SB 404, which bill sponsor Sen. Erika Geiss (D-Taylor) said would allow “curbside” voting for disabled voters. It allows food, drink and entertainment to be provided to voters standing in line as long as it doesn’t interfere with voting or turn into electioneering.
Democrats and Republicans bounced back and forth about if this bill prohibits or allows anything new, or if it makes actions that “were already legal, super legal,” as McBroom put it.
Johnson took issue with the fact that the bill doesn’t say a bag of chips labeled “paid for by a candidate’s election campaign” would be considered electioneering, and Geiss said it wouldn’t need to since existing law would call that electioneering.
