Election Day 2026: Detroit Votes' Matt Friedman answers last-minute voting questions

Meantime, I want to bring in Matt Friedman, who's joining us now live from Detroit Votes. Matt, thanks for joining us. I don't know if I think your audio might not be coming through, Matt. I don't know if you are muted, but certainly. Oh, there we go. OK. OK, good. I was trying to check before and I'm glad it works now. And I appreciate you taking some time for some nonpartisan voter information to let people know. What they need to do if they still need to vote today. Absolutely. Clocks ticking. Eight o'clock is the deadline. Now, do Detroiters need to, what do they need to know for today? A couple of things. Number one, I've gotten a lot of questions today about the Department of Justice sending monitors to Detroit and seven other cities. I've been in touch with election officials in Detroit and really around the state all day. The presence of these monitors is very limited, just at a couple of precincts, and there are no reports of the monitor's presence getting in the way of anybody voting. So please. Don't let anybody be deterred from voting just because they've heard the government has monitors. It's a common thing. It's happened before. It happened during the primary in August. It will not get in the way of you voting if you want to vote today in your neighborhood precinct. And that's one of the two options you have today until eight o'clock to vote. You can vote at your neighborhood precinct or if you still have that absentee ballot sitting at home. You can fill it out. You can vote for whoever you want to vote for and get that absentee ballot to one of the 38 secure drop boxes in neighborhoods around the city. If you don't know where the drop box is closest to you, you can go to DetroitVotes.org. Those absentee ballots will be accepted until eight o'clock tonight. Yeah, it's certainly great information for anyone who is in line before 8 o'clock. You could still vote after 8 o'clock. You show up in line. Doesn't look like you can vote after that, right? Yeah, I mean, the polls close at eight o'clock. And let there be no confusion, even though there are some counties in the western Upper Peninsula that are on central time. You might see on some of those national lists that the polls close here at nine. No, it's eight o'clock local time, Detroit time. That's what you have to vote, again, either in person at your local precinct or via absentee ballot in one of the 38 drop boxes around the city till eight o'clock. And Matt, for anyone watching and wondering, well, when are we going to know who won or who's winning any of the races? What are what can we know about tonight and what can we find out tonight? There'll be quite a bit known tonight because in Detroit, the largest city in the state, in Wayne County, the largest county in the state, absentee ballots have been counted since last Monday. So we'll know a lot before the late news tonight, but there will not be final numbers in Detroit until very early tomorrow morning. I want to set everybody's expectations. And there will be ballots coming in late tonight by truck into Huntington Place in the middle of the night to be counted. Because those are the ballots that arrive in drop boxes tonight until 8 o'clock. Those 38 drop boxes across an enormous 140 square miles in the city of Detroit. So by the time all those ballots are collected tonight, the signatures are verified and they're processed and tabulated at Huntington Place. It's going to take until the early hours of tomorrow morning. So there will not be final results tonight. But I think a picture will start taking shape of how Detroiters voted later tonight. And for anyone who isn't familiar with Detroit Votes, what does the organization do for our city? Thanks for asking. What we've been doing in very close partnership with the city of Detroit is providing nonpartisan voter information for the last several months. So voters have the information they need to confidently vote in any way that makes sense for them. There's so many more options for voting than there used to be. And we had 25,000 Detroiters vote in early voting in the city over the last week or so. That's up from zero just a few years ago because there was no such thing. So Detroiters are starting to understand their options, exercising their options and having confidence to vote however they want to vote. And that's what Detroit Votes has been trying to spread the word on the last several months. Yeah, we've seen a lot of younger voters turn out. So certainly some big record breaking numbers there. And we'll continue watching over all things, voting, elections. We're in all the cities. We're tracking them all. So we appreciate you, Matt, for joining us. And you have a lot on your plate, too, today. There's a lot going on on your end. Yeah, I'm heading down to Huntington Place shortly where I'll be working with your colleagues and counterparts to make sure that they understand how absentee voting is conducted. And the city clerk, Janice Winfrey, will have a press briefing there at 830 tonight to give an update on how Detroiters voted this year. When I say how, I mean, all the different options and the number of voters and the estimate on turnout we'll have in just a few hours. I'm glad you mentioned that because Janice Winfrey is going to also speak at 3.30. She's been doing multiple updates throughout this afternoon, and we will stream that 3.30 live update. We'll also take the 8.30 update. So Matt, we appreciate you. Detroitvotes.org, right? Detroitvotes.org to find that drop box. If you still have the absentee ballot at home and thousands of people do Matt Friedman, we appreciate you and take care. Enjoy the day. I know you have a lot going on. Thank you. You do too. I know that. Thanks for all the coverage. Of course, yeah.