It's got to make more work for the clerks. First, they have to issue and process the mail-in ballot applications, then they have to process the ballots themselves, check signatures etc. In some states, they also have to give the voters a chance to "cure" any errors on their ballots.
This voter ID thing could be easily solved by having the Secretary of State issue a free picture ID to everybody when they register to vote. When the township clerks did the registering, they used to issue each registrant a plain old paper card with the instruction to show it when they went to vote. I carried mine around for years and was never asked to show it, so I threw it into my "miscellaneous" drawer and forgot about it. Now that the Secretary of State is doing the registering, they could make picture IDs with the same equipment that they use to make driver's licenses.
I didn't know about the early voting centers. Michigan just passed a law that requires nine days of early voting. I assumed that they would use the same precinct polling places that they use now and would have to pay somebody to staff them for those nine days. If they make early voting centers like they have in Chicago, I imagine that they will be farther from home than our local precincts. In our relatively thinly populated area, the traveling distance to the early voting center might easily cancel out the perceived convenience of voting early.
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