asane

How to vote if you’re in the hospital on Election Day in Michigan

Online Niel November 6, 2024

If you’re hospitalized on Election Day and worried you won’t be able to get to the polls, don’t worry: you can still vote from your hospital bed.

That’s because Michigan is among 39 states nationwide that allow hospitalized patients to request an emergency absentee ballot on Election Day, according to National Conference of State Legislatures. Under Michigan law, if a voter becomes physically disabled or unable to go to the polls due to illness or a death in the family after the absentee ballot deadline, the voter may request an absentee ballot until 4:00 p.m. on election day.

The Free Press checked with several hospital systems in metro Detroit, including Michigan Medicine, Henry Ford Health in Detroit and Detroit Medical Center, and they said they are prepared to help patients who can’t get to the polls but still want to vote.

And with the margins as thin as they are in the presidential race, with polls showing Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump in a virtual tie in Michigan, every vote will count.

For candidates and voters alike.

How to vote from your hospital bed

If you’re unfortunate enough to be hospitalized on Tuesday, here’s how you can still exercise your right to vote:

On Election Day, notify the hospital staff as soon as possible that you would like to receive an emergency absentee ballot. An application for an emergency absentee ballot will need to be completed. Hospital staff or social workers are available to help.
An application for an emergency absentee ballot must be submitted to the local clerk’s office by 4:00 p.m. on Election Day.
A designated person, whether a family member, loved one, social worker or volunteer, will deliver your application. The clerk will then issue an emergency absentee ballot and deliver it to you at the hospital either through a deputy, staff member, or designee.
At the hospital, you’ll fill out your ballot, put it in a sealed envelope, and a designated person must then deliver your ballot to your local polling office by 8pm on election night.

Hospital staff, however, cannot vote for you. As DMC noted in a statement to the Free Press: “While our staff cannot help patients vote, they do have instructions to share with patients who were unable to vote due to an emergency illness or hospitalization but still I want to vote. an emergency absentee ballot.”

right USA Vote Foundation, to vote by emergency absentee ballot, you must be a registered voter. If you cannot complete your ballot yourself, another person is allowed to help you complete it. There will be a space, either on the form or on the envelope, where the person who assisted you can sign and verify their role.

Medical students travel thousands of miles to deliver bulletins to patients

Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor knows all too well how much patients want to vote, given what the University of Michigan Hospital System saw during the 2020 general election and 2022 midterm elections: Medical student volunteers traveled 1,579 miles – sometimes more than two hours apart. — send emergency absentee ballot applications and completed ballots to state clerks’ offices for patients who did not have family or social support to help them vote.

These voters included:

A patient who had never voted before and wanted to exercise this right.
A patient who had not missed an election in over 50 years.
A terminally ill patient who said the election would likely be their last opportunity to vote.
Patients who gave birth on or near Election Day and were unable to leave the hospital.
Patients who cannot vote in person due to a COVID-19 infection.

Michigan Medicine says it is ready once again to help its patients request emergency absentee ballots during this election cycle, if they make such a request. So is Detroit-based Henry Ford Health, which this fall announced its joint venture with Ascension Michigan and became the state’s second-largest hospital system. The largest is Corewell Health, which, like all Michigan hospital systems, plays a dual role every two years: helping patients heal physically and helping their voices be heard on Election Day.

That’s because Michigan law gives the sick and infirm the right to be heard at the polls, right up to the last minute.

But not all voters have this privilege.

Woman with lung cancer begs to vote; Mississippi says no

In Mississippi, a woman named Nancy Oliver collapsed in her home on Thursday and ended up in the hospital, where doctors found a mass on her brain and informed her that she had metastatic lung cancer.

At 72, Oliver now faces brain surgery on Election Day. She desperately wants to vote in the presidential election, but Mississippi law doesn’t allow it. The state’s deadline to request an absentee ballot was Nov. 2, and her pleas for help went nowhere.

That means she can’t vote, nor can her family rush to be with her, prompting Oliver to call for a change in the law.

“This election for president is the most important ever. I can’t be there. There should be something people can do.” Oliver told the Clarion Ledger Monday from her hospital bed. “I’m sure there are a lot of other people who have these last-minute emergencies… It should be easier to care for, so that people in the hospital and their families who come from out of town have the opportunity to vote for who do they think should be in office.”

Although deflated, Oliver said he had one more request on Election Day: to be allowed to watch the ICU results.

While laws vary from state to state, the Michigan Election Law of 1954 states the following: “Any registered voter may request absentee ballots at any time before 4:00 p.m. on election day if he shall be physically disabled or will be absent from the city or town due to illness or death in the family, which occurred at a time that made it impossible to apply for absentee ballots by the deadline legal.

Contact Tresa Baldas: [email protected]