The State of Michigan plans to audit about 20 Detroit polling locations following reports by The American Mirror and others on irregularities discovered during the recent presidential recount.
The Michigan Bureau of Elections realized that the number of ballots inside recount containers at “a number of places” didn’t match the number recorded by officials.
Conservative activist Ken Crider wrote on Facebook about one example at Detroit Precinct 152 that was highlighted by The American Mirror and shared more than 8,500 times online.
Crider wrote:
Penny Crider and I just got back from helping watch the recount at Cobo Hall in Detroit. On Nov. 8th (election day) the election officials at 8:00 pm shut down the polls. They then reconciled the differences from the machine count and the voter count on the computer. At this point a Metal tag/seal with a serial number is put on the box and the box was taken away.
Penny’s precinct, Detroit Precinct #152 had an unbroken seal and everything looked proper. The tag on the box said 306 and the book said 306 and the ticket said 306, so there should be 306 paper ballots on the box, right. Well when they pulled out the ballots the stack seemed short and when they finished separating the two page ballot to count the Presidential page only guess how many ballots were in the box? 304 no, 299 nope, 200 nada, how about 100 wrong again. There were only exactly 50 paper ballots in a locked sealed box that again was supposed to have 306.
According to the Wayne County Clerk’s publicly released vote totals for Precinct 152, Hillary Clinton benefited the most from the “error” and received 250 votes while Donald Trump got 31 votes.
The Michigan Supreme Court put an end to any hope of a full presidential recount on Friday, though most municipalities halted efforts days prior when the Michigan Court of Appeals shut it down and Green Party candidate Jill Stein appealed that ruling, The Huffington Post reports.
Regardless, Michigan Secretary of State spokesman Fred Woodhams told Michigan Radio the brief exercise exposed significant problems in Detroit, and state officials launched an audit of about 20 Detroit polling locations to put voters’ minds at ease.
“We want to give people reassurance about what happened and we will look into the matter thoroughly and if there’s more action that needs to be taken we will do that,” he said.
Detroit had by far the worst voting discrepancies in the state with officials unable to recount votes in 392 of the city’s 662 precincts because of unbalanced counts or broken seals, The Detroit News reports.
Also, according to the News:
Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News.
Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books.
State Sen. Patrick Colbeck, one of several lawmakers who called for an investigation, took to Facebook to applaud the Detroit election audit.
“According to MIRS News Service, the MI Secretary of State is launching an investigation in 20 Detroit Precincts including Precinct 152 which had a ballot box sealed and certified as having 306 votes yet only 50 ballots were found inside,” Colbeck wrote.
“Excellent start,” he posted. “I’m looking forward to their findings.”
Woodhams told Michigan Radio that local election officials said the discrepancy at Precinct 152 was simply human error, and paper ballots were put in the wrong box. If voters feed their ballot into a machine, he said, then it’s counted.
“Voters should know when they mark their ballot and they feed it into the tabulator, it is being counted,” he said. “So the fact that the ballots were not properly transferred into a field container doesn’t affect the fact that their ballot was counted.”
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