In 2020, city clerk Jackie Beaudry and her staff took over the Huron High gym to process a flood of absentee ballots. This year, they’ll have the city’s new election center on Miller Rd. | Photo by Mark Bialek
That quote from a 2023 memo by then-deputy city administrator John Fournier has since become the unofficial motto for Ann Arbor’s new $5.25 million election center and studio space for Community Television Network.
The building in the Forest Cove complex on Miller Rd. will store absentee and early-voting ballots and the high-speed tabulators that count them on election night, and host the bipartisan inspectors who monitor the count.
Councilmember Lisa Disch, D-1st Ward, calls it a “guarantee for providing election security in a context of vastly more democratic ways of voting.”
“Our ballots have always been safe. Our elections have always been secure,” says Disch. “However, since 2018, we have seen revolutionary changes in how people vote.” That’s when Michigan voters amended the state constitution to make it easier to register and vote, including allowing early in-person voting and dropping restrictions on voting absentee.
The changes came just in time for the onset of Covid-19. “November 2020 during the pandemic … was an all-time high absentee rate,” emails city clerk Jackie Beaudry: 87 percent of votes that year were absentee. It might have been higher if Trump hadn’t dissed absentee voting: The former president wasn’t far behind Biden among the 59,590 votes on election day—but he and Mike Pence got just 27,855 absentee votes. Biden and Harris got 125,932.
Since none of those ballots could be counted until election day, staff set up a secure, windowless room in City Hall to store them. For the count itself, they installed the tabulators in the Huron High School gym.
That “proved to be a perfectly sized space for our needs,” Fournier wrote, but “with students back in school, we cannot have access to it [again]. … Further, the city rents space from a privately owned warehouse to store our election equipment between elections and for election supply preparation.”
Though 2020’s count remains a record, Beaudry writes, “absentee voting has generally increased each year.” Fournier noted that in the 2022 mayoral election, 55 percent of the votes were absentee—more than 30,000 in all. But when staff began looking for a permanent location to store and count them, they found that gym-sized spaces are rare: “A building that is 12,500 square feet total is unlikely to have 4,500 square feet dedicated to an open workspace,” Fournier wrote. “To get the open space we need, we had to look at buildings much larger, in the 20,000 square feet range.”
Related: Clerks’ Quandary
That’s where CTN came in: Disch says that moving its offices and studios to Forest Cove from rented space on South Industrial will “help sweeten the package.” According to Fournier’s memo, its share of the building cost will be less than the city is now paying in rent.
Council responded with a unanimous vote to pay $2.8 million for the building and budget an additional $2.4 million for remodeling. Funding is coming from $996,750 in American Rescue Plan allocations, $1,075,000 from the general fund balance, and $828,250 from the sale of the “Y Lot” on S. Fifth Ave.
Beaudry emails that they moved into the building “as is.” They’re using it this year to store and count absentee ballots, for “precinct and early vote supply management and [the] Election Night Receiving Board” that observes the count. Beaudry is guessing they’ll send out “between 30,000 and 35,000 [absentee] ballots” this year.
“After the 2024 cycle, we plan to engage an architect to redesign the space to include an election center,” she writes. “After the renovations, we may also consider moving our absentee ballot mail process from City Hall to this location as well.”
Mayor Christopher Taylor calls the new building “crucial to absolutely everything we do. … We, and many jurisdictions throughout the country, have not had a dedicated space where we can secure, administer, and supervise our elections.”
“The driving purpose behind this center is election security and adapting to the revolutionization of voting,” says Disch. She expects the renovations to be completed in time for the 2026 elections.
“My perfect world is on the way,” Taylor says. “It will be a place that folks recognize as the brain center of democracy.”