Michigan: Voters may see new voting machines as soon as August | MLive.com

Michigan limped through the last election on machines that were more than a decade old, but clerks across the state will soon purchase new ones under contracts approved by the State Administrative Board on Tuesday. “Every election currently, we’re always dealing with different types of mechanical breakdowns … just because the equipment is old and it’s time to upgrade to new technology,” said City of Walker Clerk Sarah Bydalek, who is president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks. Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum said the old machines her precincts use come with humidity issues, and jam if ballots absorb too much moisture. But clerks are expecting those issues to decrease with a statewide rollout of new voting machines by Aug. 2018. The State Administrative Board approved 10-year contracts with three different vendors: Dominion Voting Systems, Election Systems and Software and Hart InterCivic. Secretary of State spokesman Fred Woodhams said each county clerk would choose a system to go with, and local clerks in that county would purchase that system.

Michigan: Johnson: Michigan may boost post-election audits | The Detroit News

Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said Thursday voting irregularities in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan that spurred a state audit of the city’s ballots are prompting consideration of expanding post-election audits. Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during the presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News. The voting irregularities prompted an audit of the city’s ballots following the election. “We’ve done 1,400 of them, and we’re going to be looking at how we can broaden those audits even further,” Johnson said after a celebration of Michigan’s 180th anniversary as a state, without providing further details. “We’re looking at that right now because we’re doing some auditing of some of the communities that had some issues, and then we’ll know more exactly what we need to do because there’s nothing more important to democracy than making sure that we have great elections.” Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of Detroit’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books.

Michigan: State Selects New Voting Machine Vendors for Next Election | Government Technology

New voting equipment will be available for the next statewide election in August 2018 after the Michigan Secretary of State announced the selection of three vendors Tuesday that local clerks can use for future elections. The pricetag will not be cheap. The state administrative board approved contracts Tuesday with the three vendors that will cost between $52 million and $82 million. The state has $30 million leftover from the federal Help America Vote Act funds that were provided to states for new equipment after the 2000 elections. And the Legislature approved an additional $10 million last year to pay for the new machines. And while that will cover the majority of the cost for the new system, Fred Woodhams, spokesman for Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, said Tuesday that there will be a cost for local communities of roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per precinct. Some communities have a minimal number of precincts, but for cities like Detroit, Warren, Southfield and Grand Rapids, the costs could be significant. Detroit has nearly 500 precincts, while Grand Rapids has 77, Warren has 58 and Southfield has 36.

Michigan: State chief: Nothing ‘fraudulent’ in Detroit election | The Detroit News

An ongoing but largely completed state audit of the Nov. 8 presidential election in Detroit has yet to produce any evidence of fraud, Michigan Bureau of Elections Director Chris Thomas said Tuesday. Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office launched the audit in mid-December after voting irregularities were discovered during a partial recount of the election, including mismatches between ballot boxes and recorded vote totals in nearly 60 percent of the city’s precincts. While state auditors continue to review data in Lansing, they have finished on-the-ground work in Detroit. A report is expected in early February. “We essentially are finding so far — it’s certainly not final — but we’ve not run into anything we’d call fraudulent,” Thomas said. “We’ve seen a lot of performance issues, and that’s primarily what we’ve run into.”

Michigan: Justice Department sues Eastpointe, cites voting rights violations | Detroit Free Press

The Justice Department is suing the city of Eastpointe, alleging that it violates the Voting Rights Act by denying black residents an equal opportunity to elect city council members of their choice. The lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in Detroit, says no black candidate has ever served on the Eastpointe City Council and that white voters have consistently opposed and defeated black voters’ preferred black candidates. It seeks a court order that would force Eastpointe to change how its city council is elected. It currently consists of the mayor and four council members who serve staggered four-year terms. Of the 32,000 people living in Eastpointe in 2010, nearly 10,000 were black, according to the U.S. Census. Current estimates place the city’s black population at closer to 40%.

Michigan: US Justice Department files voting rights suit against Eastpointe | The Detroit News

No black resident has ever won office for council, school board or legislative district in this Macomb County city, even though one-third of its electorate is black, according to the federal government. The U.S. Justice Department blames Eastpointe’s electoral process, saying electing members by citywide popular vote — instead of by district — is racially discriminatory and violates the Voting Rights Act. The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a federal complaint seeking to end the practice, which city officials say has been in place since 1929.

Michigan: Stein: Election audits should be automatic in Michigan | The Detroit News

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said Wednesday her abbreviated recount effort showed the vote “was not carefully guarded” in Michigan and should spur legislative action to require automatic post-election audits. Republican President-elect Donald Trump was poised to maintain his 10,000-vote margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton when Michigan’s hand recount was halted more than two million ballots in, but Stein suggested the rare glimpse under the hood of the state election system served an important purpose. “What we discovered is we do not have a system that we can trust,” Stein said in a radio interview on Michigan’s Big Show, citing complaints from Detroit election officials who said 87 optical scanner voting machines failed on Election Day, along with other documented vote count and ballot handling irregularities.

Michigan: Ballot cans must be replaced after recount problems | The Digital Reporter

After problems with the Branch County recount for the November Presidential election, there will be a change in how voted ballots are stored. Branch County Clerk Terry Kubasiak told township supervisors, this week, the County Board of Canvassers plans to ban the use of decades old metal vote cans for after election ballot storage. “The Bureau of Elections was there and pretty much told the Board of Canvassers they should not have certified (the ballot cans) the last time,” Kubasiak explained. That means each township must buy approved ballot bags. Branch County ballots went through a recount in Kalamazoo before courts ended the complete state recount of presidential ballots. Six of the 22 precincts could not be recounted.

Michigan: Fact check: No proof in story of mass voter fraud in Michigan | Detroit Free Press

A widely shared story that claimed in headlines that Michigan had mass Democratic voter fraud and that more than half of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s Detroit vote faces disqualification is false. State election officials say there is no proof to back up either claim. The story posted by Higgins News Network on Dec. 6 is headlined: “Michigan Recount: Over 1/2 of Hillary Clinton’s Detroit Vote Faces Disqualification,” with an updated headline on Dec. 7: “Michigan Recount Halted After Mass Voter Fraud Discovery,” with a subhead: “Federal Judge Officially Stops Michigan Recount After Discovery of Widespread Democrat Vote Fraud.”

Michigan: Detroit’s election woes: 782 more votes than voters | Detroit Free Press

Whether the result of machine malfunction, human error or even fraud, the unexplained voting discrepancies in Detroit last month were not sizable enough to affect the outcome in Michigan of the presidential election, according to a new Free Press analysis of voting precinct records. In 248 precincts, there were a total of 782 more votes tabulated by voting machines than the number of voters listed as picking up ballots in the precincts’ poll books. That makes up just three-tenths of 1% of the total 248,211 votes that were logged in Detroit for the presidential election. That number was far too small to swing the statewide election results, even in this year’s especially tight race that saw a Republican win Michigan for the first time since George Bush in 1988. Donald Trump carried Michigan by 10,704 votes, or 47.5% to 47.3%, according to the final results submitted to the Michigan Secretary of State. But in Detroit, Democrat Hillary Clinton trounced Trump, winning 95% of the vote to his 3%.

Michigan: Records: 95 Detroit poll books missing for several days | The Detroit News

Detroit elections officials waited several days to deliver nearly 100 poll books to Wayne County officials charged with certifying the presidential election, newly released documents show. County clerk officials on Thursday released a memo to State Elections Director Chris Thomas that said 95 poll books from the 662 precincts weren’t available at the start of the canvass, which began the day after the Nov. 8 election. Five of those poll books, which contain the names of voters and ensure the integrity of elections, were never delivered to county canvassers and presumably remain missing. The revelation comes atop other irregularities that have prompted a state audit. Among other issues, The Detroit News reported this week that voting machines registered more votes than they should have in one-third of all city precincts.

Michigan: Detroit to get new voting machines as city clerk blames state, human error | Detroit Free Press

Five weeks after a national scandal involving broken Detroit voting machines and ineffective poll workers, state Elections Director Chris Thomas said Wednesday evening that the city will get all new voting machines in time for the 2017 mayoral and City Council elections. But broken machines were not the biggest problem Detroit endured election night. Citing a memo he just received, Thomas said there were dozens of other problems that occurred Nov. 8. “I got an e-mail yesterday from Wayne County showing me what the issues were on (Detroit) polling places and precincts, and quite frankly, it was somewhat shocking,” he said. Thomas said his staff soon will head to Detroit to get a better understanding of why the city has such problems running elections and to find ways to help. Among the problems cited in the memo, he said: Ninety-one precinct reports were not delivered on time. County officials had to re-create missing poll books. Five precincts had no poll books, so Detroit election officials had to find voter applications and re-create the books — and hundreds of poll worksheets had either too few or too many ballots.

Michigan: Detroit Voting Machine Failures Were Widespread on Election Day | TIME

More than 80 voting machines in Detroit malfunctioned on Election Day, officials say, resulting in ballot discrepancies in 59% of precincts that raise questions about the reliability of future election results in a city dominated by Democratic and minority voters. “This is not the first time,” adds Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city. “We’ve had this problem in nearly every election that we administer in the city of Detroit.” Baxter says that the machines were tested for accuracy before election day in accordance with state and federal guidelines, but that sometimes the machines “hit up against each other and malfunction” as they’re being transported to the precincts. The machines were optical scanners, meaning they registered and counted the votes marked on paper ballots. Many of the machines jammed over the course of election day, perhaps because Michigan had a two-page ballot this year, which meant that paper ballots were collected but inconsistently recorded by the machines.

Michigan: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts | The Detroit 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. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday. The Detroit precincts are among those that couldn’t be counted during a statewide presidential recount that began last week and ended Friday following a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court. Democrat Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly prevailed in Detroit and Wayne County. But Republican President-elect Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes or 47.5 percent to 47.3 percent.

Michigan: Michigan elections panel weighs value of vote recount | Detroit Free Press

All sides agreed Tuesday that state and local election officials did a generally good job on a statewide presidential recount that was halted by the courts on Wednesday after two and a half days of counting. But testimony before the Board of State Canvassers differed on whether the partial recount requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein served a useful purpose. Still, the board voted Tuesday 3-1 to formally reject Stein’s request for a recount. To Stein attorney Mark Brewer, who formally withdrew Stein’s recount request at Tuesday’s meeting of the state elections panel, the recount turned up significant problems with uncounted ballots, faulty machines, and large numbers of precincts that could not be recounted under state law.

Michigan: Strict voter ID bills stall in Senate | The Detroit News

The Michigan Senate plans to adjourn for the year Thursday without taking up a strict voter identification proposal, Republican Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof said Tuesday, prompting cheers from protesters outside the state Capitol. Telling reporters the so-called lame-duck session may go down as a “tame duck,” Meekhof added that the upper chamber is unlikely to take up House-approved legislation to boost fines for “mass picketing” or subject state legislators and the governor to public records request laws. The controversial voter ID proposal, approved last week by the Republican-led House, would have required voters to bring photo identification to their local clerk’s office within 10 days if they don’t have an ID on Election Day. Failure to do so would have voided their provisional ballot.

Michigan: State to audit ‘significant’ mismatches in Detroit vote | Associated Press

Michigan’s elections bureau ordered an investigation Monday into substantial ballot discrepancies in a small portion of Detroit’s voting precincts, after the discovery of a polling place where 300 people voted but only 50 ballots were properly sealed in a container. Since learning of the issue last week during Michigan’s presidential recount, state officials have learned of similar “significant mismatch” problems at roughly 20 of Detroit’s 490 precincts, said Fred Woodhams, a spokesman for Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson. He said there is no reason to think votes were not counted and the differences would not have affected Republican Donald Trump’s narrow victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the state. Clinton won 95 percent of Detroit’s vote. Detroit elections officials told the state that in the one precinct, the 250 missing ballots were left in the tabulator bin, “but we want to verify this,” Woodhams said. It was not immediately clear what caused the inconsistencies in other precincts.

Michigan: Stein concedes end of Michigan recount, suggests reform | Associated Press

Officially, history will record President-elect Donald Trump as having won the 2016 presidential race in Michigan by some 10,704 votes. But Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate in the 2016 election, believes that the numbers would be different if all 4.8 million votes cast in the Wolverine State were recounted. That won’t happen, Stein conceded in a rally in downtown Detroit on Saturday, a day after the non-recused members of the Michigan Supreme Court ruled, by a 3-2 margin, against Stein’s appeal, leaving the candidate with no recourse. “We may be moving out of the court of law, but we’re moving into the court of public opinion,” Stein said. … “In the three states where filed recounts, we had Donald Trump, his superPACs and the Republican Party pulling out all the stops,” Stein said. “And you have to wonder, why are they doing this? What is Donald Trump afraid of? Either he does not have faith in democracy or he does not believe he won this election.”

Michigan: Recount mess: What if Michigan had held the key to election? | Detroit Free Press

Imagine for a moment: What if Michigan’s 2016 presidential election had been a repeat of Florida’s in 2000? Imagine that Donald Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton had been just 200 votes instead of 10,000 and that the whole country was waiting on one last state to pick its winner. Instead of examining hanging chads in Palm Beach County, the eyes of the world would instead be riveted on Wayne County, where one ballot box was sealed with duct tape and hundreds of precincts couldn’t be recounted because of other errors. A recount in Michigan in 2016 almost certainly wouldn’t have mattered. But what if it would have? “If this had been a scenario where Michigan would have been the deciding factor in a presidential election, we would have been embarrassed as a state,” said Jocelyn Benson, a law professor at Wayne State University who founded the nonpartisan Michigan Center for Election Law. “It would have brought national attention to the inadequacies of an election system that is in desperate need of reform.”

Michigan: Michigan Supreme Court denies Jill Stein’s appeal in recount case | MLive

The Michigan Supreme Court has denied Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s appeal to restart the statewide presidential recount, exhausting what’s likely the last legal option for the Stein campaign. In a 3-2 order issued Friday evening, the court ruled a recount petition in Michigan “must allege both that fraud or mistake exists and that the alleged fraud or mistake caused the candidate to be aggrieved.” The majority order concurs with a State Court of Appeals ruling that ordered Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, which certifies election results and handles other election-related issues, to reject the recount on grounds that Stein was not sufficiently “aggrieved” as required under state statute earlier this week. The Michigan Supreme Court justices split along partisan lines, with all three Republican-nominated judges ordering a denial of Stein’s appeal. The two Democratic-nominated judges, Richard Bernstein and Bridget McCormack, each wrote dissenting opinions.

Michigan: Election Recount Halted, Jill Stein Likely To Appeal Ruling | International Business Times

A federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections on Wednesday to stop the state’s electoral recount after a state court ruling found Green Party candidate Jill Stein had no legal standing to request recount of votes. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith said “there is no basis” for him to ignore the state court ruling that said the recount should never have started. Stein’s campaign condemned the judgment and promised to challenge the Michigan Court of Appeals decision. Republicans have argued that the three-day recount must end as the state appeals court found that Stein, who finished fourth in Michigan on Nov. 8, did not have a chance of winning even after a recount and therefore is not an “aggrieved” candidate.

Michigan: Clerks still in limbo following halt of recount | Times Herald

Sanilac County Clerk Denise McGuire said she hasn’t yet canceled her recount team. While a federal judge late Wednesday halted the hand recount of 4.8 million ballots cast for president in Michigan after days of conflicting court decisions, McGuire isn’t quite sure the wild ride is over. “We are scheduled for Sunday, I am waiting until tomorrow before I call the recount team members to cancel,” she said in an email. “The Bureau of Elections’ message was they didn’t expect it to resume and I want to make sure further appeals are not filed today.” St. Clair County was scheduled to begin the recount of its nearly 80,000 ballots Thursday morning. Following orders from the state that came after the judge’s decision, County Clerk Jay DeBoyer called off his workers planning to come to the Blue Water Convention Center. “We are not going to turn the ballots back to the local clerks and we are not going to tear down our room any time soon,” he said.

Michigan: State owes Green Party’s Stein a refund since ballot recount stops | Detroit Free Press

Green Party candidate Jill Stein is in line for a big check from the State of Michigan after the recount she requested was stopped by a federal judge and the state Board of Canvassers after only three days of counting ballots. Under state law, Stein had to pay $125 per precinct — or $973,250 — to count Michigan’s 7,786 in-person and absentee voting precincts. That check was delivered to state officials when she requested the recount last week. Now, with only a fraction of the recount completed, Michigan’s Secretary of State is prepared to refund a portion of that amount, said Fred Woodhams, spokesman for Secretary of State Ruth Johnson. Stein will have to pay for the precincts in Michigan that were counted, but she will not be charged for the precincts that couldn’t be counted because of problems with the ballot containers. When the recount was stopped Wednesday after a ruling from U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith, 26 counties had started counting their ballots.

Michigan: Recount supporters criticize court rulings, pin hopes on Michigan Supreme Court | MLive

Supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein and the statewide presidential recount she requested in Michigan aren’t thrilled with state and federal court rulings that shut the process down as of Thursday morning. The Green Party is expected to hold an “emergency rally” in front of the state Supreme Court building 2 p.m. Thursday at 925 W. Ottawa St. to protest a decision they consider unfair and potentially harmful to Michigan voters. “The discrepancies we’ve discovered while counting votes so far are precisely the reason we need a recount in the first place,” Green Party member Lou Novak said in a statement. “We will not back down from this fight now. The Michigan Supreme Court must do its job.”

Michigan: Election board cancels meeting after judge ends recount | The Detroit Times

Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers canceled plans Thursday to hold a formality vote on ending a statewide recount of the presidential election after a federal judge effectively shut down the recount Wednesday night. The panel of two Republicans and two Democrats approved an order on Wednesday that instructed state election officials to stop the recount if U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith lifted a restraining order that triggered the recount on Monday. “It was determined that their vote yesterday addressed the order from the Court of Appeals, so there’s no need to vote and the recount is stopped,” said Fred Woodhams, spokesman for Secretary of State Ruth Johnson. As a result, the state’s certified results from Nov. 28 stand, Woodham said Thursday. President-elect Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes over Democrat Hillary Clinton, a 47.5 percent to 47.3 percent victory.

Michigan: Judge’s order suspends Michigan’s recount | The Detroit News

A federal judge Wednesday suspended a recount of the Nov. 8 presidential election that started three days ago and has yet to reveal fraud or significantly alter the results. The manual statewide recount cost as much as $3 million but stopped after U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith lifted a temporary restraining order preventing state officials from stopping a recount prompted by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. A state election board could end the recount at a scheduled Thursday meeting. Stein failed to show she was an aggrieved candidate as defined by state law and entitled to a recount, the judge said. He concluded Stein’s request to test the election system’s vulnerability to fraud lacked evidence. “But invoking a court’s aid to remedy that problem in the manner plaintiffs have chosen — seeking a recount as an audit of the election to test whether the vulnerability led to actual compromise of the voting system — has never been endorsed by any court, and would require, at a minimum, evidence of significant fraud or mistake — and not speculative fear of them. Such evidence has not been presented here.”

Michigan: GOP senators seek probe of Wayne County election issues | The Detroit News

Twenty-three Republican state senators are calling on Attorney General Bill Schuette to investigate voting irregularities in Detroit and Wayne County discovered through the presidential election recount. At Wayne County’s recount Tuesday, election workers opened a Detroit precinct’s ballot box that was suppose to contain 306 ballots but only had 50 ballots, according to an election observer for President-elect Donald Trump. The missing ballots caused State Elections Director Chris Thomas to investigate the matter Wednesday while he was at Cobo Center for Wayne County’s recount. Thomas said Detroit Elections Director Daniel Baxter told him the ballots were left in a container that sits below the voting machine in Detroit’s precinct 152. “At the end of the night, they take those ballots out, put them in these metal ballot boxes and bring them to the city elections office,” Thomas said Wednesday. “For whatever reason, they got left in the tub below the tabulators and it wasn’t discovered until they brought them back in. At that point, they hadn’t been sealed, so they can’t be counted.”

Michigan: Stricter voter identification law passes House | Detroit Free Press

Stricter voter identification laws were described Wednesday night as both a way to ensure the integrity of elections is upheld and a means to erect barriers for vulnerable and minority voters. But in the end, Republicans who sponsored and supported the bills making voter identification laws more stringent, won the day, approving the main bill in the package on mostly party line votes of 57-50. Five Republicans joined all the Democrats in opposing the bill. “This protects the integrity of every legal citizens’ right to vote and to make sure the fraudulent votes aren’t cast,” said state Rep. Gary Glenn, R-Midland. “It seems to be a common sense requirement.”

Michigan: Bill requiring Stein to cover all recount costs approved by House committee | MLive

Jill Stein could be on the hook for millions of dollars to cover the cost of a Michigan election recount if a Republican-sponsored bill is enacted into law. HB 6097 would require candidates more than 5 percent of the vote behind the winner to pay the entire actual cost of a statewide recount, and it would be retroactive to the beginning of 2016. It would only apply to statewide and federal offices. House Elections Committee Chair Lisa Lyons, R-Alto, introduced the bill last week and it passed out of that committee on Tuesday, Dec. 6. All five Republicans on the committee approved moving the bill forward. Democrats Jeff Irwin, D-Ann Arbor, and Jon Hoadley, D-Kalamazoo, voted against it and Democrat Gretchen Driskell, D-Saline, abstained. A recount of Michigan’s vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election began Monday. Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, is paying a required fee of $973,250, but Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson has said the actual cost could be $2 million or more.

Michigan: Courts Disagree Over Michigan Vote Recount | The New York Times

Dueling court rulings left the fate of a presidential vote recount in Michigan uncertain on Tuesday night, and elections officials in the state said they were “seeking clarity about the next steps.” A recount of last month’s election had already begun in parts of Michigan, one of three closely contested states where Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential nominee, had called for new counts, when the seemingly conflicting legal decisions emerged late Tuesday from state and federal courts in Michigan. Ms. Stein has cited concerns about computer hacking and the reliability of voting machines, setting off legal fights with lawyers for President-elect Donald J. Trump, his campaign and his allies, who view the recounts as a needless and expensive tactic. A panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals found that Ms. Stein, who finished a distant fourth to Mr. Trump in the election, had not met the state’s requirements for a recount because she had no chance of winning. The panel concluded that the Michigan Board of State Canvassers ought not to have permitted a recount to go forward because Ms. Stein, given the size of the vote for her, could not be deemed “aggrieved,” as required for a recount under state election law.