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.”
The bureau has “been working closely” with the city of Detroit to take a closer look at several precincts where voting machine tabulator totals and poll books “didn’t balance,” he explained.
Detroit issues surfaced during a statewide recount of the Michigan election that was requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein but was eventually halted by state and federal judges before it was completed. Democrat Hillary Clinton gained 103 votes on now-President Donald Trump in a hand recount of 2,099,578 ballots in 22 of Michigan’s 83 counties, including 10 that were fully completed before court intervention.
Michigan law bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals, which happened in 10.6 percent of precincts statewide. The issues were worst in Detroit, where officials could not recount votes in 392 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 59.2 percent.
Full Article: State chief: Nothing ‘fraudulent’ in Detroit election.