Clinton Township consolidates precincts

CLINTON TOWNSHIP — Changes are underway to how Clinton Township hosts its elections.

As of Feb. 10, the number of voting precincts has been reduced by half from 42 to 20, and in-person election day voting sites have been slightly reduced from 23 to 19. According to Elections Coordinator Matthew Cheung, the changes are being made in response to the state raising the precinct size from 2,999 to 4,999 in 2023.

“It also helps us streamline elections with efficiency and managing our workers,” Cheung said. “It’s a lot more manageable in terms of the number of workers and the resources that we have to allocate to each polling place.”

By consolidating polling places and precincts, the township reduces the number of ballots it needs to print from 48 styles to 28. Staffing levels are expected to decrease from over 450 election workers to 315, a 30% reduction that could save the township $72,000 in wages. Maintaining election day staffing levels of eight poll workers per precinct would see staff sizes shrink from 336 to 160, and increasing staffing to 10 workers per precinct would still leave levels below 2024 levels with 200 poll workers across the township.

Cheung, in a presentation to the Clinton Township Board of Trustees on Feb. 10, argued the changes to staff levels would make polling places more manageable, reducing the chances of election administration errors and possibly speeding up the preparation of results. Reducing the number of precincts also cuts down on the amount of work the Department of Public Works has to do setting up and tearing down election equipment.

When consolidating the precincts, care was taken to base the boundaries around those for the state legislative seats, school districts and the Macomb County Board of Commissioners. This has led to more precincts being noncontiguous and several precincts lacking a polling place within its borders.

“The law says that we should try to be as contiguous as possible, but it does not mandate that they are contiguous,” Cheung said. “The ones that are not contiguous fall within the same (legislative and school) boundaries; they are not contiguous, but they are geographically close, and it was the best way to optimize those precincts.”

Along with the state increasing the maximum precinct size, early voting has seen a decrease in residents voting on election day proper. Only 36.4% of Clinton Township residents who voted in the November 2024 election did so on election day while 63.6% voted either by mail or utilized early in-person voting. The reduction of polling places means more voting booths can be set up at in-person voting sites and any tabulators that would normally be used in a consolidated precinct could now be enlisted for counting absentee ballots. Early in-person voting itself is not affected by the precinct reductions, with Township Clerk Kim Meltzer saying the township plans on having three locations available for early voting during state and federal elections in 2026.

“The one we can guarantee is the Civic Center,” Meltzer said. “We can’t for certain say if we’ll have Kensington or Faith Baptist Church, however we are hoping to have them. It was very successful working with them, and everybody was great to work with … The Civic Center is central to the whole township but there are parts of the community where even coming to the central location is a challenge. That’s why we really wanted to focus on the south end and the north end of the township.”

Meltzer says it is too early to know exactly what the non-Civic Center locations will be because schedules for other venues cannot be pinned down so far in advance.

Residents will be mailed new voter identification cards with details about their new precincts and polling locations.

Residents in new precincts 4, 5, 8, 12 and 18 will be prioritized because of the upcoming Mount Clemens Community Schools bond election in May, though voters will report to transitional polling locations rather than their new normal polling location.

For the May election, voters in precincts 4, 5 and 8 will vote at the Harry L. Wheeler Community Center and Administrative Offices while voters in precincts 12 and 18 will vote at the Robbie Hall Parker elementary school.

To find out more about the new precincts and how they may affect you, Clinton Township residents are urged to visit clintontownship.com/183/Clerk-Elections. To speak with someone in the clerk’s office, call (586) 286-9422 or go to the office at 40700 Romeo Plank Road.