Announced Incompetence Is a Bad Trend for Michigan
I’ve been in the room with Gary Miles and done stories on Jocelyn Benson many times before. Both the Detroit News editor and Michigan’s Secretary of State are smart people who take pride in their work.
I know who they are, but I don’t know what they’re doing. Two weeks before the most important election of our lives, Miles and Benson have chosen to announce their inability to the world.
Benson, Michigan’s chief election administrator, went on CBS over the weekend to downplay expectations of a quick vote count. Election Barbie said it would take an entire day to count Michigan’s votes, which could reach 6 million. She cited 2020, when the vote count took a full day, as her lodestar.
But this isn’t 2020.
Back then, Michigan was in its first cycle with no-reason absentee voting. Add in voting by mail and an inability to process ballots before Election Day, and that’s why it took 24 hours to count 5.5 million votes.
In the time since—and at Benson’s behest—Michigan changed the law, giving clerks the ability to process ballots ahead of time. Just last month, the Brennan Center, a progressive think tank, upheld Michigan as an example of election reform done right.
“Since 2020, when vote counts slowed in many states due to large increases in mail voting and operational constraints necessitated by public health measures, some states updated their laws to enable election officials to count votes and release results faster,” read its Sept. 24 story. “Most notably, Michigan now allows election workers to begin processing and tabulating mail ballots before Election Day.”
A 2020 timetable with 2024 laws would be a letdown. Michigan can and should count ballots accurately within just a few hours. On Nov. 5, we will accept nothing less.
Already, Benson tells us, 16% of Michigan voters have cast ballots. These are mostly absentee votes. Early voting starts on Oct. 26. There is not just an Election Day in Michigan, there is a season.
A cliffhanger would make for a bad season finale, Jocelyn.
Over at the Detroit News, standards are hard to find these days. Publisher Gary Miles recently wrote a letter to subscribers, explaining why it took the 151-year-old newspaper two days to print a story on Whitmer’s apology for the Dorito communion.
Gary, take it from here:
“When a public official apologizes for something we covered, they typically want to reach the same audience that saw the original news. And we feel an obligation to our readers, and to the official, to fairly note their statement of contrition. The unusual problem in this instance was that we didn’t have it. And we couldn’t get it. The governor’s office had not distributed it to us—no press release or statement and no social media posts. As a practice, we do not merely copy the reporting of another news outlet without attempting to verify it ourselves, so we asked the governor’s office for the apology.”
When he wrote this, the Detroit News was selling one-month subscriptions for 10 cents.
Today, they’re free for a month. By the New Year, the News will be paying people to read it.
The low price of the work is about what you’d pay for a news outlet that admits it sat around all weekend waiting to be sent an email.
Miles’s kicker then downplays the Dorito apology, while upholding the News as some type of beacon of accuracy, which it isn’t. He wrote:
“It was hardly the biggest story of the week, and it was largely overshadowed by former President Trump’s dissing of Detroit, which we wrote about here and here, and which also offended some deeply. But it’s another reminder that while we always want to be first, we first want to take pains—and even delays—to be accurate.”
To defend bad news journalism, Miles offers bad opinion journalism, purporting to tell the reader that Trump’s “Detroit diss” was a bigger story than the Dorito communion. So what’s a couple days delay matter, really?
But as Miles explained, the News still didn’t have the statement when it finally ran the story. It was only after the story ran—in Miles’s words, “very shortly after”—that the governor’s office confirmed anything.
So the News failed to deliver timely, true stories, which is its mission. But when it finally got embarrassed at being the only news outlet in the world without the apology story, it tossed away its precious rulebook. To hear Miles tell it, the News’s standards are a castle made of sand.
A weekend of waiting that could’ve been avoided with 5 seconds of action.
These things should be embarrassing for smart, prideful people to admit. Under Jocelyn Benson, Michigan can’t count votes fast, no matter how many laws they change to make her job easier.
And under Gary Miles, the governor can stiff the Detroit News on unfavorable stories, knowing they won’t publish for days without her confirmation. They know this because he just told them. Brilliant!
Gary and Jocelyn: I get that your jobs are hard and thankless. We are not tough on you just to be mean. We are tough on you because your jobs are important. They affect 10 million people, and you’re letting us down. Your work is hard, yes. But it’s not impossible.
These are the lives you have chosen, the sacks you ruck to the summit of your careers. You’ve both been paid handsomely for your efforts.
The burden of performance will not get any lighter, so we need you to get better at carrying it.
Will you meet the moment?
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.