After a record voter turnout in the August primary, local clerks are gearing up for an even bigger showing for the Nov. 6 general election.

Chris Thomas, a national voting expert and the former longtime director of elections for the Secretary of State, said Tuesday he expects statewide turnout in November to be in the neighborhood of 4 million voters, setting a new record.

"I think it will be higher than in 2006 when we hit 3.8 million," he said. "I generally wouldn't use primary results to make predictions about the general, but this was a big jump. I particularly looked at the Oakland County returns, where they generally get between 193,000 and 200,000 voters, and they were at 320,000.

"There's a bit of a pent-up desire to vote, not only with all the statewide offices open, but the ballot proposals are stimulating enthusiasm."

Detroit officials project that between 41 and 46 percent of the city's 470,000 registered voters will cast a ballot Nov. 6, marking a significantly higher turnout than in previous elections. Voter turnout in both 2010 and 2014 was 31.4 percent.

Several other clerks in metro Detroit communities said they also are preparing for higher voter turnout — in person and via absentee ballots.

"I've been preparing for more of a presidential turnout," Troy City Clerk Aileen Dickson said.

To prepare for the expected increase, Detroit Elections Director Daniel Baxter said the city clerk's office has printed about 400,000 ballots and has trained about 13,000 people to work at the polls on Election Day. Baxter said the city is also increasing the number of voting booths at various poll sites.

"We are going to have one for every 100 voters to ensure we won't have any bottlenecks," Baxter said, adding the city has received about 6,000 new voter registrations so far.

The city has also received about 38,000 absentee ballot requests — 9,000 of which have been returned. By the time additional requests are received, city officials expect 45,000 of the total ballots to be absentee.

In 2010, 37,507 absentee ballots were cast, and in 2014, absentee ballots accounted for 49,810 of the vote, according to Detroit voter turnout records.

Absentee ballots statewide are holding relatively steady compared with previous midterm election years. In 2014, 594,466 absentee ballots had been requested by Oct. 6 and 16,072 had been returned. So far this year, 594,305 absentee ballots have been requested and 16,620 have been returned. But in the state's most populous county of Wayne, the number of absentee ballots that have been returned by voters has more than tripled.

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Baxter provided his update during the Detroit City Council's Tuesday session.

Although some have said City Clerk Janice Winfrey has made progress in cleaning up the city’s voter rolls, her office came under fire in November 2016 during the presidential election, when equipment failures and other errors at many precincts brought Detroit to a national stage and cast a negative light on its election processes.

A state audit revealed widespread counting discrepancies that effectively precluded a recount in Michigan. But state and local officials said using state-of-the-art voting machines wouldn't have changed the state's results.

Council members expressed concern Tuesday about previously reported issues at polling locations. In the August primary, a handful of locations suffered power outages, causing some voters to leave, Council President Brenda Jones noted.

Members also inquired about what the clerk's office is doing to prevent issues with equipment and other errors.

Winfrey and Baxter noted that polling site assessors are slated to come out to test the equipment prior to the election. Winfrey said her office is prepared.

In the suburbs, Troy's Dickson is not alone in her projections. Novi and Clinton Township also have exceeded the number of absentee voter ballots they sent out in the last gubernatorial election in November 2014.

In Troy, the city had requests for 8,800 absentee voter ballots in November 2014. As of Tuesday afternoon, it had almost 8,650 absentee ballot requests and is expecting it will surpass its 2014 figure.

The clerks said they are looking for more poll workers and have ordered 100 percent or more ballots based on their number of registered voters.

Novi City Clerk Cortney Hanson said the city will have more voting booths and is following the state recommendation of one booth for every 80 to 100 voters.

She is anticipating more voters based on what feels like new voter registrations pouring in, and on more absentee voter ballots issued — from more than 6,600 so far this year compared with just more than 5,000 in November 2014.

"We're getting closer to (presidential absentee voter ballot totals) than we ever have," Hanson said.

Clinton Township Clerk Kim Meltzer said her office had sent out 12,930 absentee voter ballots as of Tuesday, more than in November 2014 and getting closer to the 15,987 absentee voter ballots sent by the end of the November 2016 presidential election.

She said her office got 100 percent of ballots printed for its approximately 77,000 registered voters. She said she has printed 100 percent of ballots for a presidential election, but not a midterm.

"We don't want anything to happen like it did in Oakland County," she said, referring to the ballot shortage that occurred during the primary.

Meltzer said cardboard dividers have been bought to create four privacy locations at tables for voting to accommodate the anticipated higher turnout.

She encouraged voters to read ballot initiatives ahead of time and to take their sample ballot answers with them to speed up the process.

"If you can plan for this election, you will not have to wait a long time," she said.

As of Oct. 6, the number of people registered to vote in the election was 7,436,194, Secretary of State's Office spokesman Fred Woodhams said Monday. That's a little behind the 2014 October number of 7,446,280, but ahead of the 2010 October number of 7,276,237, he said.

Kat Stafford is the Detroit government watchdog reporter for the Free Press, covering city issues and the community. Contact Kat Stafford: kstafford@freepress.com or 313-223-4759.