Dropping Your Ballot Off @ Lansing City Hall

I got my ballot in the mail last week. I revealed earlier I thought I had requested one several weeks ago and hadn't seen anything in my mailbox. So I went back online, requested an absentee ballot, and  this time I read and followed ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS TO THE LETTER.

Boom I got my ballot.

I took my time, perused the candidates, made my decisions, and sealed it all up. Secrecy sleeve and all.

I could just drop it in the mail as I live right around the corner from the post office at Collins and Jolly.

I could have found a handy ballot drop box located near me. Where are my ballot drop boxes?

Nope. I'm going to hand deliver it to City Hall myself.

And over there where it says drop box. That's where they would have you deposit your envelope.

I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted to make sure mine made it upstairs into the hands of the City Clerk. However, I was there just before 3 pm and was told I had to wait a little bit before I could go up. They were busy with a bunch of other city clerk duties in addition to collecting ballots and I could go, just after 3.

The security detail at the metal detectors told me I could just drop it off at the ballot box outside.

But that's when I told her about this.

On Thursday, Oct. 8, one of the Lansing City’s 15 drop boxes was found unlocked at 1:35 p.m. The drop box in question is located at Lansing City Hall. The box was emptied at 10:45 a.m. by the courier. (WILX)

The security guard looked at me and laughed and actually got frustrated. She'd explained this a couple of times to people. And she understood their fear and reluctance to drop off their ballots outside. But she assured me it was safe to do so.

Lansing's City Clerk has been hard at work letting folks know what happened and how it's being taken care of moving forward.

• Replace their current courier and have either two staff people traveling together or a security company to collect each drop box daily

• Installation of a monitor, which will live stream all security cameras on a monitor so that they can be observed while staff are working (WILX)

Plus, once you've drop off you ballot, you can track it.

If you've got any voting questions or concerns please head to Michigan.gov/vote or tap on the button ABOVE (all the way up top) in the trending bar that says VOTE 2020.