Gretchen Whitmer Knew Exactly What She Was Doing

Delaying elections is an equal opportunity voter suppression tool that needs to be called out whenever employed

By Kristine Christlieb, MFEI News & Commentary Editor

April 29, 2026

When Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet vacated Michigan's 35th State Senate District on January 3, 2025, to take her seat in Congress, the clock started ticking on a vacancy affecting 270,000 residents in Bay, Midland, and Saginaw counties.

Under Michigan law, the governor, and only the governor, holds the authority to call a special election to fill that seat. Days passed, then weeks, then months. Finally, seven Michigan citizens sued Whitmer, a move that likely forced her hand to act.

By the time Whitmer finally scheduled elections in late August 2025, the seat had been vacant for 238 days. By the time voters will cast ballots on May 5, the district will have gone without a state senator for roughly 490 days, surely a record, at least on the state level.

Since becoming governor in 2019, Whitmer has taken an average of 17 days to call special elections, and before this vacancy, never more than 74 days

She moved with particular speed when Democrat majorities were at stake. In November 2023, when two Democratic House members won mayoral races and temporarily left the chamber split 54–54, Whitmer announced special election dates the same week those seats were officially vacant. Speed, it turns out, is available when the political math favors your party. Delay is available when it doesn't. 

That is not an oversight. That is a strategy and a well-known political principle — controlling the clock is everything. It is one of the oldest levers in democratic governance, understood by every strategist, lawyer, and legislator who has ever watched a majority hang by a thread. A vote held in January produces different results than the same vote held in November.

Whitmer Crushes Heroic Attempt to Reform the System

Republican State Representative Andrea Schroeder from Independence Township tried to prevent this from happening in Michigan. In June 2021, Schroeder introduced a bill requiring a governor to announce within 30 days of a vacancy whether there will be a special election to finish the term. The bill was personal: Schroeder had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. She knew she might not survive her term. She knew what it meant for her constituents to go without representation. So in the time she had left, she worked to make sure no governor could leave Michiganders in political limbo for political convenience.

Andrea Schroeder

Schroeder died four months later from stomach cancer on October 1, 2021. She didn't live to see what happened to her bill.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate approved the legislation. Both sides thought reform was needed. Whitmer vetoed it, saying: "House Bill 4996 places restrictions on the executive branch's exercise of its constitutional authority. I will not tie the hands of future Michigan governors."

Whitmer used those untied hands to leave a quarter million people unrepresented for the better part of two years.

Election Delay a Bipartisan Tactic

Election reform advocates have argued for years that voter suppression is a structural problem, not merely a partisan one. The Michigan case proves it. When a governor of any party can hold a vacancy indefinitely to protect a legislative majority, the voters in that district have been suppressed. Their representation is held hostage not by law but by political calculation enabled by statutes that grant governors near-absolute discretion and no deadline and protected by vetoes of the very reforms that might constrain them.

Whitmer is hardly alone. The tactic transcends party lines with remarkable consistency. In Florida, the ACLU sued Ron DeSantis multiple times — in 2021, 2023, 2024, and again in 2025 — for failing to call special elections for vacant legislative seats. Each time, DeSantis only scheduled the elections after the lawsuits were filed. His own predecessors, including Jeb Bush and Rick Scott, routinely called special elections within days of a vacancy; DeSantis has taken as long as 73 days, prompting his own party's election officials to call the pattern illegal.

In Texas, when Democratic Congressman Sylvester Turner died in March 2025, Republican Governor Greg Abbott waited 33 days to set a special election date — the longest he had ever waited in ten years as governor — and scheduled the election for November, meaning the heavily Democratic Houston district would go 244 days without representation in Congress.

But neither of these Republican governors have come close to what Whitmer is doing in Michigan's 35th State Senate District.

Andrea Schroeder saw this problem clearly. Near death, she drafted the legislative fix but died before Whitmer killed it.

Gretchen Whitmer knew exactly what she was doing.