When I first heard that Jill Stein had decided to push for recounts and/or audits of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, I was cautiously optimistic; my initial response was basically “if you’re serious about this and it’s not just a fundraising scam, fair enough.”
Well, so far it seems to me that it’s kind of both...she’s raised nearly $7 million, and a big chunk of that will probably remain in the Green Party coffers...but to her credit, she’s making good on her promise, so credit where due.
Unfortunately, so far it sounds like it might be a big waste of time even if the machines were hacked:
Well that’s just great. This defeats the whole point of doing a recount. If they just run the ballots through the same machines again, they might pick up a stray error or two (a ballot with a faintly-filled in bubble, or a ballot which didn’t register the first time due to a mangled corner or whatever)...but that’s about it. The numbers may change by a couple hundred state-wide at most, I’d imagine.
However, if the machines WERE hacked and remain so, running the ballots through them a second time isn’t gonna reveal a damned thing. Let’s suppose they were hacked to flip every 100th Clinton vote to Trump (more than enough to flip the state to him). Guess what? Running the same ballots through the same machine will still flip every 100th vote. This completely defeats the purpose of having paper ballots in the first place.
UPDATE: OK, hold on, this may not be as stupid as the tweet above makes it out to be. Here’s the actual relevant wording from the canvasser commission memo:
Method of Recount
At the time of the 2011 statewide recount of the Supreme Court Justice election, the statutes required that voting equipment must be used to conduct the recount in those locations where ballots were originally tabulated by equipment, unless the petitioner convinced a court that due to an irregularity, defect or mistake a recount using tabulating equipment would produce incorrect results and that a hand count would likely produce a more correct result and change the outcome of the election.
The option to petition still exists under Wis. Stat. s. 5.90(2) if court action is initiated by the next business day following the petition filing deadline. But in addition, the statutes have been changed to allow each county to determine whether they wish to conduct the recount by hand. In some cases a hand count will be less expensive and time consuming than using tabulators due to the cost of programming equipment again, and due to the fact that each ballot must still be examined even if tabulating equipment is used. The relevant language in s. 5.90(1) is:
Unless a court orders a recount to be conducted by another method under sub. (2), the board of canvassers may determine to conduct the recount of a specific election by hand and may determine to conduct the recount by hand for only certain wards or election districts. If electronic voting machines are used, the board of canvassers shall perform the recount using the permanent paper record of the votes cast by each elector, as generated by the machines.
The second sentence of this provision refers to the touch screen equipment which tabulates votes electronically but also produces a voter verified paper audit trail. The Stein campaign’s recount petition requests a hand recount of all ballots. As part of the Commission’s recount order and procedures, it is the recommendation of Commission staff to honor each county’s statutory option to make the decision regarding the method of their recount.
Recommended Motion:
The Commission directs staff to decline the Stein campaign request to order counties to tally all ballots by hand, and to permit each county to determine whether ballots will be counted by hand or using tabulating equipment, consistent with existing state law.
OK, this is somewhat better for a couple of reasons:
- First, it suggests that some counties may decide to do their recounts by hand anyway.
- Second, and more importantly, it states that the equipment would need to be reprogrammed in order to do the machine recount anyway. I’m not sure if “reprogramming” means simply resetting the machines back to 0, or if the software itself has to be completely reinstalled, but hopefully the process of doing so would wipe out any malware/etc along the way.
3. Voting Equipment Audit:
While a handful of municipalities chosen for the post-election voting equipment audit have completed their audit, many are scheduled to begin on Monday, November 28th. Commission staff excused municipalities from the audit that are involved in the 32nd Senate District recount because the recount process is a more intensive review of the voting equipment’s performance and the overall election processes than the audit.
They’re referring here to Wisconsin’s 32nd State Senate race, where Democrat Jennifer Shilling has a mere 58 vote lead over Republican Dan Kapanke...a mere 0.065% difference.
Staff has advised municipalities selected for the voting equipment audit that they can postpone that process until the completion of the recount, and that staff will consult with the Commission at its December 14th meeting as to whether it is still necessary to conduct the voting equipment audit following completion of the recount. No Commission action is required at this time unless the Commission wishes to alter this staff direction.
Meanwhile, here in Michigan, here’s a Detroit News article which provides some interesting tidbits about the recount effort:
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has hired former Michigan Democratic Party chairman Mark Brewer as her attorney in a statewide hand recount she plans to request by Wednesday’s deadline, a campaign official said Monday.
This is actually a big deal. Mark Brewer led the successful effort earlier this summer to put an injunction on the MI GOP’s law which would have gotten rid of straight-ticket voting. Ironically, this may actually have helped the GOP in parts of the state and potentially even statewide this year, but I still support keeping straight-ticket voting regardless. The larger point is that this is a pretty serious move on her part.
Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers meets at 2 p.m. Monday to vote on certifying election results in all 83 counties that show Republican President-elect Donald Trump narrowly prevailed over Democrat Hillary Clinton by 10,704 votes.
That action will start a 48-hour clock for Stein to exercise her right to request and pay for a hand recount of 4.8 million votes cast in the contentious Nov. 8 election.
It’s important to note that Michigan uses 100% optical scan paper ballots, and our machines are not connected to the internet. This doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have been hacked, but it cuts off at least one obvious means for that to happen.
Here’s the key point that they’re focusing on:
Stein has suggested Michigan had a “sky-high number of blank votes,” which is why she plans to pursue a recount of the Nov. 8 results. Stein received 51,463 votes, or about 1.1 percent, of the ballots cast in the presidential election.
Trump edged Clinton 47.6 percent to 47.4 percent of the vote, while Libertarian Gary Johnson finished third with 3.6 percent. Approximately 84,290 ballots were cast in the election without votes in the presidential contest.
Lass said the recount would show whether any of those ballots contain faintly marked ballots that were missed by Michigan’s optical-scanning machines.
“Michigan does not have an audit of the machines, so a hand recount of all of the paper ballots is the only way to make sure the machines are counting properly,” he said.
84,290 Michigan voters supposedly showed up to vote for other races but skipped over the Most Important Presidential Election Of Our Lives. I checked out the Michigan SOS website to take a look at past years to see how this matches up; here’s what I found:
As you can see, the number of MI voters skipping the POTUS race is unusually high this year...nearly twice the rate as the average of the previous 4 elections, which averaged around 0.9%. Based on prior POTUS elections, you’d have expected roughly 44,000 people to skip the top of the ticket. Instead, 40,000 more did so this year.
On the one hand, if there were voting machine/counting shenanigans in Michigan, that’s nearly 4x as many as would be necessary to flip the state from Hillary to Trump.
On the other hand, while 1.73% is unusually high...it’s not insanely high, especially given the extremely high unfavorables that both candidates had this time around.
In other words, while I do support the recount/audit effort as a matter of principle (not to mention that the stakes are higher than ever this time around), I honestly wouldn’t expect much to change here in Michigan, even though we have the smallest (official) vote gap of the three states (10,704, or just 0.22%).
UPDATE x2: Meanwhile, Stein has apparently officially filed in Pennsylvania as well. Regardless of her motives overall, so far she’s at least making good on her promise to file in all 3 states.
However, PA has unusual recount laws, so it might be only certain sections of the state:
In Pennsylvania, a statewide recount can occur if at least three voters per precinct or election district submit affadavits. There were some 9,175 election districts in Pennsylvania as of June, 2015, according to Citizens for Election Integrity (CEI), a group which advocates for accuracy in elections. In her video, Stein makes a plea for volunteers from each district to file these affadavits, and she walks through the steps necessary to file the paperwork. There’s downloading the affadavit from her website, and filling it out -- did you vote on an optical scanner or electronic touchscreen, she asks, explaining the difference between the two machines.
After all of this, she warns the volunteer voters not to sign their affadavits until they’re in the presence of a notary public. And afterwards, they’ll have to submit their affadavits to the clerk in their individual election districts.
That’s not all -- the deadline varies from district to district, Stein notes in her video. It could be Monday or it could be Tuesday, Stein says, and in some districts, “the deadline has already passed.” As she talks through all the steps, it’s evident that she knows that she’s asking for a lot, and the odds are long for a statewide recount -- over 27,000 individual voters in these precincts in every corner of Pennsylvania would have to follow these instructions perfectly, notwithstanding the districts where the deadline has already come and gone (but there aren’t many of those, she said).
...If Stein does succeed in getting a recount in Pennsylvania, it may resemble the one undertaken in 2004 in Ohio, initiated by the Green Party. The New York Times noted at the time that the statewide recount of Ohio’s 88 counties resulted in a net difference of 285 votes, meaning that George W. Bush beat John Kerry in Ohio by 118,457 votes, instead of 118,775. The recount concluded on Dec. 28, 2004, nearly two months after the election took place.
For the record, here’s the “official” gap in all 3 states as of this writing according to the Cook Political Report spreadsheet:
WI: Clinton down 22,525
PA: Clinton down 68,030
MI: Clinton down 10,704 Total: 101,259
UPDATE x3: Back to Michigan...it looks like there may be a far simpler explanation for the “excessive” undervotes for POTUS, as noted by this guy on Twitter:
(sigh) yeah, I suspect this is the major cause of those “extra” 40,000 undervotes: Write-ins for Bernie. Every year there’s a small number of write-ins, but even those usually go to candidates who filed as a write-in candidate. In Michigan, write-in votes for candidates who didn’t even file for that status simply aren’t counted whatsoever.
Take a look at earlier years, where besides the Libertarian and Green party candidates, you had these other “significant” names:
- 2000: Ralph Nader (of course) and Pat Buchanan both on the ballot
- 2004: Nader (again) on the ballot
- 2008: Nader (AGAIN?? Jesus Christ) and Alan Keyes as a write-in (129 votes)
- 2012: Gary Johnson (write-in that year, not Libertarian; received 7,774 votes)
Given that Bernie a) won the Michigan primary and b) still has/had a significant die-hard support base, it seems reasonable to me that a good 30-40K of them might have written his name in as opposed to voting for Hillary or Stein.