Jill Stein’s Recount Uncovers Election Problems in Michigan
[guest post by JVW]
I know this news is a few days old but I don’t think it has been discussed here, and it is too much fun to ignore. Green Party Presidential candidate (Dr.*) Jill Stein’s demanded recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have run their course with varying results. In Wisconsin, the recount added an additional 131 net votes to the President-elect, bringing his margin of victory up to 22,748 votes and adding an additional .002% to his share of the state’s vote. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge denied Dr. Stein’s request for a recount, citing no shortage of reasons why it was a fool’s errand.
But Dr. Stein and her supporters appear to have hit the motherlode in Michigan, where their valiant efforts have at last uncovered election irregularities. On Tuesday, The Detroit News reported that discrepancies between reported totals versus actual numbers of ballots on hand is spurring an audit by the secretary of state’s office. Unhappily for progressives, the problems were uncovered in Detroit and Wayne County. Hillary Clinton captured 66.3% of the vote in Wayne County, and probably a significantly larger share in the city. From the article:
State officials are planning to examine about 20 Detroit precincts where ballot boxes opened during the recount had fewer ballots than poll workers had recorded on Election Day.
[. . .]
The recount problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 of the city’s 662 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. State law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.
[. . .]
Republican state senators last week called for an investigation in Wayne County, including one precinct where a Detroit ballot box contained only 50 of the 306 ballots listed in a poll book, according to an observer for Trump.
City officials have told state officials that ballots in that precinct were never taken out of a locked bin below the voting machine tabulator on Election Day, said Secretary of State spokesman Fred Woodhams.
And that’s not all. Yesterday, the Detroit Free Press reported further on the failure of Detroit precincts to keep accurate paperwork as required by law:
Detroit’s election paperwork was in such disarray that the Wayne County Board of Canvassers almost missed its two-week deadline to certify the presidential election.
Ninty-five poll books, lists of people who cast ballots, were delivered late to the board. Five of those precincts never did turn in a poll book, according to a memo from the Wayne County Clerk’s Office to state election officials.
[. . .]
Other problems found in Detroit’s handing of the election included 13 precincts that turned in poll books with missing voters. Staffers working for the board of canvassers were forced to flip through hundreds of individual voter applications to compile the count of people who voted in those precincts.
Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey defended her office’s handling of the 2016 presidential election, telling the Free Press on Wednesday that the city has struggled to attract poll workers in recent years.
In case the reader forgets how all of this audit came about, the Free Press helpfully reminds us:
Detroit’s problems were exposed during a statewide recount effort by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, which was later halted by a court before it could be completed.
I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong, and I was wrong about the righteousness of Dr. Stein’s demands for a recount. She has done all of us a favor by exposing the shady practices of the typical urban Democrat machine, and for that she deserves a measure of thanks from us.
– JVW
* Her supporters are for some reason very big on having the Harvard-trained internest identified as “Dr.” Jill Stein, even though she retired from her practice a decade ago. That’s a courtesy they don’t seem willing to apply to, for example, Ben Carson or Tom Coburn.
