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 needs to update its voting equipment, train its poll workers better and embrace early voting and post-election audits that have worked successfully in other states, Benson said. “We’re just one close election from a complete meltdown,” Benson said.
Lawrence Norden, deputy director of a voting-rights advocacy program at the Brennan Center at New York University, agreed. “All the problems that happened in Detroit, so many issues, so much conversation,” he said . “It’s not something I would have wanted to imagine. We are in a much more polarized time now than we were, even in 2000.”
Full Article: Recount mess: What if Michigan had held the key to election?.