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Michigan recount hits a snag — 15 Comments

1. It’s hard to mess with the Michigan system unless you have a way to “rix” the count by hacking into the machine. I don’t think the machines are connected to the web, so it’s not going to be an outside job.
   The ballot is somewhat larger than a sheet of paper from a legal pad, stiffish, almost carboard. Counting two ends and two sides, there are four ways to insert it into the counter. It’s certainly possible that somebody isn’t watching or doesn’t get the DIRECTIONS on the ballot and the machine. But eventually, you’ll get it right. But perhaps somebody puts it in part way, pulls it out and turns it over….something like that. At what point in the supposed process there is a “count” is a question. Poll workers aren’t watching you do this, so an immediate correction isn’t in the cards.

2. Looking at the news story, it seems most of them were off by only a few ballots
   “n Detroit, 158 of the 392 precincts with ballot discrepancies had just one extra ballot accounted for either in the poll book or in the ballot box, according to the Wayne County’s canvassing report.

   For suburban Wayne County, 72 percent of the 218 precincts boxes with discrepancies in the number of ballots were off by one ballot.

   The other ballot discrepancies in Detroit and Wayne County precincts ranged between two and five ballots, according to the report.”

3. I read the same story earlier this morning and my reaction is much the same, though the story itself omits some important details that a reasonably bright person would want to know, and I count someone with an average IQ as reasonably bright. So, if any readers here are election officials in Michigan, or know one personally, please ask them for clarification. In any case, below is my interpretation of the story, with added suspicions about what it means:

   Michigan voters fill out paper ballots that are then fed by an official into an optical scanner that both counts the votes for all candidates in all races, and counts to total number of ballots fed through machine. Due to people not voting at all in a particular race, it is perfectly reasonable for the total number of counted ballots to not match the summed totals of candidates unless there is a separate count for “No vote” in this race”, which I will assume there has to be (anyone know?)

   So, when the ballots from a machine/s are combined, bagged, and sealed, are the total ballots in the bag hand-counted, or do you enter the number what the machine/s gave you? Of course, the vote totals for the listed candidates totals are the machine/s counts. So my interpretation is that the numbers written on the bags are different than what was reported for that bag on election night.

   The above sounds odd to me. Let’s suppose the Wayne County official was truthful about this being an error caused by repeated feeding of ballots through balky optical scanners without resetting the counter itself. Wouldn’t all the counts be offset the same way? Why would this lead the wrong number being entered on the bag that was actually different from vote count on November 8th and 9th?

   What I am asking is- what exact numbers on the bags are entered in the first place? If a collection of ballots was machine counted before being bagged, shouldn’t the numbers provided on election night be the same as those entered on the bag itself? I got the impression from the story that the bags are opened and initially hand counted for sheer number just to make sure the total number of ballots corresponds to what was entered on the bag the day of or after the election. If, after two counts, this number does not agree with what the bag showed, it can’t be officially recounted for candidate totals because it is a priori evidence that ballots were removed or added to the bag.

   The Wayne County official’s explanation can be correct and innocent at the same time. I can certainly imagine accidental mistakes of this type being made, but I can also imagine nefarious reasons for these counts to be off in this way, and it is quite interesting that these mistakes seem to be predominantly occurring in Detroit, Flint, and Lansing. At this point, I want to see a hand recount in Wisconsin and Michigan. My suspicion is you will find that ballots were fed through the counting machines multiple times in different locations, and on much larger scales than statistically predicted for simple human error.

4. Whycoh,

   Some questions. My impression is that what you are talking about are discrepancies in numbers entered on the bag when it was sealed and the poll book numbers to account for the ballots used. These numbers would have been generated the night of the election or the day or two afterwards as the canvassers finished their work. A good canvasser is supposed to ensure these 1 or 2 ballots errors are dispensed with before the bag is sealed in the first place, and the Detroit News story seems to indicate that some canvass boards might have been lax in certifying results before accounting for these small discrepancies. If this is all that is at issue, I would agree that it is a minor one and the precinct should be recountable regardless.

   However, that isn’t the impression I got from the first story. It sounded like to me that the bags have already been opened and the ballots inside are counted for sheer number to make sure the number entered on the bag is the same as hand counted, and this is done twice (or even more) if there is a disagreement. I would imagine if you had a bag of 1000- 10000 ballots, a hand count might make an error of one or two the first time, but a second count is likely to be more thoroughly done to ensure it is as completely accurate as is possible- you triple check stacks of 10 and triple check the numbers of stacks. It sounded like to me there are significant discrepancies in the numbers entered on the bag versus was was found when they were opened this week.

5. Yeah, well, “Detroit”. What else is new.

   Blast from the past.

   http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20110822/BLOG097/110829985/detroit-has-more-registered-voters-than-residents-over-18-census

   And this, from 2005 Det News, is probably gone, but I add it for flavor,

   Sunday, October 30, 2005 Detroit News exclusive report

   Absentee ballots tainted?

   ”
   A Detroit News investigation raises serious questions about the handling of absentee ballots under Detroit City Clerk Jackie Currie as the city prepares to choose a mayor, City Council and school board Nov. 8.

   Currie has been accused of irregular election practices in several lawsuits, and a review of election results, property records and databases of registered voters uncovered procedures that experts and other election officials described as questionable.

   Among findings by News reporters were ballots cast by people registered to vote at abandoned and long-demolished buildings; a master voter list with 380,000 incorrect names and addresses — including people who have died or moved out of the city; and a practice of hand-delivering ballots from senior citizens and disabled voters that were filled out in private meetings with Currie’s paid election workers.

   If the mayoral race came down to a close vote demanding a recount of absentee ballots, the result could be chaotic.

   But the most poignant findings were stories from those in nursing homes who had recently voted absentee.

   Among them is Charles B. Allen, a resident at the Passion Caring Home for the Elderly who stared blankly one day last week when asked to name the mayor of Detroit. He’s never heard of Kwame Kilpatrick and can’t recall whether he voted in August.

   “I just don’t know,” Allen said. Six years ago, a Wayne County probate judge declared the 87-year-old legally incapacitated due to dementia and Alzheimer’s.
   State law requires cities and townships to turn in election results to the county by 11 a.m. the morning after the election, and 42 of Wayne County’s 43 municipalities complied. But Detroit’s results were not turned in until nine days after the election, Jenkins said.

   When the results arrived, eight of 24 poll districts and 52 of 100 absentee ballot districts had irregularities; mainly, they recorded more or fewer votes than names taken down on election night. When two separate recounts were requested by losing City Council candidates, county canvassers deemed 40 of 107 precincts selected for recount couldn’t be recounted due to irregularities such as broken ballot box seals and numbers of ballots not matching the number of votes recorded on election night. That meant candidates had no way of determining the legitimacy of the vote in nearly 40 percent of Detroit’s precincts selected for recount.

   You can convict her of running a shoddy election,” said Mark Grebner of Practical Political Consulting of East Lansing. Grebner has studied Detroit’s election results for 30 years and compiles a list of voters that he sells to political candidates. “The big thing is, these people are incompetent. They do things that don’t make sense. We find things all the time that are appalling.”

   “

6. Where I live in Florida, we use similar tech, and we’ve not had a problem. Not even in 2000, when we recounted 3 times (?) and got the same count every time.

   You can find sample ballots here: http://www.leonvotes.org/Sample-Ballots/Sample-Ballots

   Interesting that Yancey says the poll worker feeds the machine. Here, the voter is required to feed the machine. That eliminates a possible shenanigan, but the value added there is that the scanner will evaluate your ballot for over and under votes.

   If rejected, it spits the ballot back out, and you can fix it or request a new ballot if you made an error. I want to say that there’s a “this end up” mark on the ballot so you know which way to feed the machine, but I just don’t remember that detail.

   In any case, the counter does not count up until after the ballot has been scanned and accepted. The count is the count, and if the indicator says X ballots cast, the interior should also contain X ballots. And if you hand count the ballots, the computer tally and the hand tally should be the same.

   This will sound horrible, but this ain’t rocket science. If Wayne County is having inconsistent tallies, there is something wrong.

   When my mom worked the polls with such ballots she complained that many people didn’t quite get that you’re supposed to fill in the circle, not mark it with an X or a check mark. But that should be caught as an under vote.

7. Just for fun and historical perspective – while acknowledging that Curry is dead and with Castro now, and that absentee ballots are not the issue – I will post up another portion of the article I cited wherein it begins to offer up bullet points.

   You will howl with laughter.

   “Currie refused to explain any of the problems uncovered by The News or outlined in court cases.

   She, along with her deputy, Vernon Clark, denied there are any problems with the vote in Detroit.

   “Prove it,” Currie said. “P-R-O-V-E.”

   In the past, Currie has defended her hiring of assistants as an important outreach program to encourage Detroiters to vote. She says federal law inhibits any efforts to purge the city’s voter rolls, since no names can be deleted without a death certificate or proof that the voter has registered elsewhere.

   The Detroit News probe found:

   – In the August primary, Currie’s assistants hand-delivered 4,560 ballots to the clerk’s office while another 3,314 were delivered either by one of Currie’s election officials, the voter or a member of the voter’s immediate family, according to the clerk’s office. Absentee ballots are supposed to be mailed in by the voter, unless there is a good reason not to, in which case state law outlines close family members who can deliver the ballots for the voter.

   While election officials are permitted to deliver absentee ballots to polling places, they are allowed to only when called and asked by the voter. State officials have informed Currie that the practice of picking up ballots from voters is not advisable nor is it allowed by state law, according to a review of state documents.

   – State officials have recorded concerns with Currie’s handling of elections for years. Currently, the state and Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett are battling Currie to get her to implement the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

   Under Michigan’s implementation of the federal act, the county has selected a vendor to provide state-of-the-art voting equipment. If the city accepts the county’s vendor, federal funds will pay for the equipment in an effort to create unified countywide voting systems. But Currie has told the City Council she prefers a separate vendor. The council has adopted two resolutions supporting her efforts.

   If Currie does not apply for the equipment grant by Monday, the city will have to spend $4 million to purchase its own equipment in order to comply with the federal law. A review of memos between state election officials and Currie indicates that Currie similarly battled against implementing optical scan equipment and the statewide effort to keep qualified voter lists.

   – At the Passion Caring Home for the Elderly, three people who voted absentee in the August primary could not name the mayor of Detroit or recall having voted when interviewed Thursday. Each was helped by Currie’s election assistant in a private room. Of eight recent absentee ballots mailed to the home for the general election next month, seven of the ballot recipients have been declared legally incapacitated by Wayne County Probate Court judges and suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

   – People who were mailed absentee voter applications by Currie’s office and later voted by absentee ballot have voter registration addresses of two long-abandoned nursing homes, the LaSalle Nursing Home on West Grand Boulevard and the Woodward Nursing Center.

   – In one case, Joseph Koziara voted by absentee ballot. His application for the ballot was addressed to his registered voting address, 3456 Martin, a building that was demolished in 2002 and remains a vacant lot, according to city records. Currie’s office has addressed ballot applications to demolished and vacant buildings. In one case, 34 applications were sent to a juvenile detention center for teenagers that need to be hospitalized.

   – Two people in unrelated civil cases filed against Currie have given sworn statements that they witnessed Currie’s workers filling out empty absentee ballots after the polls had closed. One of the cases is pending. In the other, a judge ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to invalidate the election in question.

   – In a 2003 race between Cheryl Cushingberry and Keith Williams for the Wayne County Commission, a fire broke out in the Detroit clerk’s counting room for absentee ballots. When people were allowed back in, a recount was impossible because ballot boxes and results had been tampered with, according to court records. Cushingberry later challenged the results, alleging absentee votes had been manipulated.

   Absentee voting has played a major role in recent Detroit elections. In the August primary, 44,000 people voted by absentee ballot out of 137,000 votes cast overall — an absentee rate of 32 percent.

   In April, 2003 when Joann Watson faced off against Gil Hill in a special election to fill a City Council seat, Watson won by just 2,939 votes. Of the 79,912 people who voted in the race, 32,799, or more than 41 percent, voted by absentee ballot.

   The national average for voting by absentee ballots is 14 percent, according to the United States Election Assistance Commission, while Detroit’s average hovers at more than 30 percent. In some races, more than 60 percent of people voted absentee.

   Currie’s problems with absentee voting go back decades. She and her late husband, Charmie Currie Jr., were charged in 1964 with conspiring to solicit 21 people to sign applications for absentee ballots and later advising them on how to mark their ballots. Currie’s husband pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge, and the prosecutor dismissed charges against Currie on grounds that “she acted out of love for her husband.”

   For years, city residents and political activists, along with state and Wayne County election officials, have tried to get answers about why it has been impossible to recount absentee ballots.

   “There have always been problems. We just want some answers,” said the Rev. Malik Shabazz, founder of the New Black Panther Nation/New Marcus Garvey Movement.

   In 2004, Currie filed a personal protection order against Shabazz after he and about 20 others picketed her home to protest what they believed was manipulation of absentee ballots to determine election results.

   “What’s this about? She just wants to keep herself and her friends in power,” Shabazz said.

   For the Nov. 8 election, Wayne County Chief Judge Mary Beth Kelly ruled that monitors be appointed to oversee the handling of absentee ballots. Kelly also barred Currie’s use of assistants called ambassadors, but on Friday, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the ambassadors could still be used.

   The appeals court didn’t say whether Currie’s use of ambassadors was legal or illegal but simply that Kelly didn’t have technical authority to bar the ambassadors as part of a contempt of court proceeding.

   The rulings stem from a suit filed in August by failed City Council candidate Maureen Taylor, who alleged she lost a spot on the November general election ballot because of absentee ballot fraud.

   As the lawsuit proceeded, Kelly issued a verbal order barring Currie from sending out about 150,000 absentee ballot applications to city residents. Currie disobeyed that order and later invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself when asked by the judge to explain her actions.

   At one point, Currie said she did not remember being in the judge’s courtroom when Kelly told her not to mail the applications.

   Under state election law, an absentee ballot must be either mailed or hand-delivered by the voter. If a voter needs help filling out the ballot — if he or she is blind, for example — the person helping must sign the back of the ballot envelope.

   But nobody is sure how the assistants conduct their work, raising questions about the safety and security of 8,000 or more ballots in every election.

   “There is no accountability,” said Stephen Wasinger, one of the lawyers challenging the election process on behalf of Maureen Taylor, the City Council candidate.

   You can reach David Josar at (313) 222-2073 or djosar@detnews.com.

8. One thing I didn’t consider, tho, are write ins. But that should still tally a vote for the particular race even if it isn’t obvious whom got the vote.

   So you’ll have something like

   votes for all registered parties on the ballot + votes for write in = total votes cast on that machine

   Here’s a video from the Michigan SoS office https://youtu.be/aizel-SzoBw?list=PLJHaXzzP47l_Ijy0GomiScH6pyu2FSub2

   I tried to look for sample ballots from Detroit, but I got nothing.

9. We use the same sort of readers in our county.

   Scenario one: Ballot count: 1000; machine total: 1001. The most likely cause is a failure to reset after a jammed ballot.

   Scenario two: Ballot count: 1001; machine total: 1000. Not so easy to come up with a reasonable cause.

   HOWEVER: in both scenarios, the paper ballots will not be recounted, and the original tally will stand. In Wayne county, that means that many precincts that were reported overwhelmingly for Clinton will not be subject to a recount adjustment: there will be no possibility of lowering her totals. Meanwhile, those precincts elsewhere, many of which went for Trump, are subject to recount, with the possibility of votes being shifted from Trump to Clinton.

   I think that the “HOWEVER” is the key item of interest here. Recounting ballots only in areas where she lost has the possibility of benefiting Clinton, whilst locking in a large number of her votes. That is the tactic here–with the added effect of avoiding looking at discrepancies in the Wayne county ballots.

10. The recount advocates known there is no way to reverse the outcome. Its all about wanting to make it difficult to certify the election results and make djt’s win look like gwb’s 2000 victory: tainted

11. CBI,

    I was thinking about this earlier when reading Whycoh’s comment about most of the errors being extremely small 1 and 2 ballot differences. While minor, and possibly due to exactly what IRA Darth described, and thus innocent, it is also quite possible that if one had done something nefarious, like simply transfer votes from one candidate to another in the reported count, one could try to cover this by simply intentionally making a 1 or 2 ballot error when sealing the ballot boxes/bags thus ensuring they never get a hand recount. This is why I want the recount now. Something doesn’t quite sound right here.

12. Of course, totally honest mistake in Detroit. The same type of error will be found in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Milwaukee, etc., etc., etc.

    The cause, very simple — those zombie voters keep stumbling around and bumping into things.

    s the late, great, Richard Daley is reputed to have said about a particularly close and unexpected election result, “Well, we count the votes.”

13. Many of you are ‘looking at the squirrel’. This has nothing to do with recounts or counting procedures. It has nothing to do with shifting electoral votes to hrc or stein. Chase your tails, but catching your tail is pointless. My cats do it better.

14. We use the optical scanners too here in Suburban Philadelphia. It is like old SATs, fill in the circles. You feed the ballot into the scanner, and it accepts or rejects it. I cannot see how it would be counted more than once. You even get a receipt. The ballot is not returned if it is accepted, so it would be hard to scan more than once.

    The premise of miscounts seems very unlikely unless there was actual fraud.

15. Maybe this is all obvious, but here is the deal with the optical scanner where I vote:

    The machine takes the ballot and doesn’t give it back when the vote is tallied. If there is a problem, the scanner spits out the paper ballot and does not register a vote.

    A poll worker stands at the scanner, instructing each voter- we feed our own ballot, which can be inserted in any direction. When the ballot is tallied, we are asked to verify that our vote was counted and we get one verification receipt.

    We carry our marked ballot hidden in a folder until we feed it into the scanner. But, the sharpie markers bleed thru the paper, so a poll watcher glancing down, can actually see the dot pattern and make an accurate guess, even if the ballot is put in face down. I live in a small town and know everyone at the polling place pretty well, and they’re all dedicated and serious. Even so, I wonder about that. We’re lunatic about politics and everything here, just like everywhere.

    If the Michigan scanners were spitting out the paper ballots and recounting the votes each time the ballot was reinserted, shouldn’t that have been raised as a problem during the election?

    We all sign in to vote, and whether we vote or not appears to be public record– I certainly get a lot of pointed political email about my voting record, which freaks me out.

    I don’t know what the procedure would be in my town if the machines became defective during the voting.

    Sometimes people abstain from voting on the ballot to make a point. But, wouldn’t it be really obvious if the total votes cast for the candidates or propositions added up to a greater number than the number of people who signed in to vote that day?

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