“It’s time to choose people over politics,” Rick Snyder said. “To alleviate concerns that this change could lead to longer wait times for voters, I’m asking the Legislature to enact secured, no-reason absentee voting.”

As public scoldings go, it was tepid stuff, an expression of the mild-mannered governor’s disappointment with the unabashedly partisan elections bill Republican state lawmakers steamrolled to passage in the final hours of their 2015 session. Still, Snyder’s rebuke might actually have meant something if he’d uttered it in the course of vetoing Senate Bill 13, which abolishes the option of straight-ticket voting but preserves the legal barriers that prevent most Michigan voters from casting more-convenient absentee ballots.

But wait – this wasn’t a veto message at all! Snyder was actually disclosing his decision to sign the unfortunate legislation in question – a straight-up effort to suppress the Democratic vote in this November’s general election.

And so, instead of signaling his determination to defend every voter’s access to the polls, Snyder’s empty words highlighted his reluctance to stand up to his party’s bullies.

Deja vu

This isn’t the first time the GOP’s most unprincipled apparatchiks have had their way with Snyder.

Once again, the governor who hates to offend anyone has chosen to sign a bill he knows is ill-conceived rather than risk a public confrontation with its authors.

I don’t mean to exaggerate the schism between Snyder and the partisan hacks who put SB 13 on his desk just in time for Christmas. The governor certainly doesn’t mourn the demise of straight-ticket voting, a tradition that disadvantaged his party’s statewide office-seekers for generations.

But Snyder is also an accountant – a man who cares about systems and gets annoyed when they fail to function smoothly. And he knows the abolition of straight-ticket voting will mean more Election Day bottlenecks not just in Detroit, but in Grand Rapids, Lansing and other metropolitan areas where lengthy ballots have tested the patience of voters and elections officials alike.

Compromise spurned

It was in response to anxieties expressed by county clerks in both parties that state Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons, R-Alto, conceived the idea of tie-barring the straight-ticket voting ban with modest changes that would afford most voters with the option of casting an absentee ballot, even if they planned to be home on Election Day. That’s the compromise Lyons’ House colleagues adopted late last year to answer charges that Republicans sought to suppress the Democratic vote any way they could.

And that’s the bill Snyder wanted to sign – and might have, with little need for apology, if only Senate Republicans had preserved the sensible link between the end of straight-ticket voting and a more-convenient absentee voting option.

But Lyons’ counterpart in the GOP Senate, Elections and Government Reform committee chair Dave Robertson, R-Grand Blanc, had no interest in mitigating the partisan advantage his party stood to secure with the abolition of straight-ticket voting.

Over the objections of eight more-principled Republican colleagues, Robertson and Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof, R-West Olive, jettisoned Lyons’ absentee-voting initiative, ramrodding the now-streamlined straight-ticket ban to passage by a single vote.

Had he stuck to the principles he outlined Tuesday and vetoed SB 13, Snyder might well have forced legislators to re-attach Lyons’ absentee voting reforms.

Listening to elections clerks in both parties, the governor might have said: Go back to your chambers and do it right.

Instead, he sheepishly signed on the dotted line and tossed off some free advice he knows Republican legislators are in no danger of taking to heart.

Snyder has taken this route before. He calls it deferring to the druthers of a co-equal branch of government. In less diplomatic circles, it’s known as surrendering without a fight.

– The Detroit Free Press