Michigan: By now everyone has heard about the Federal court order at midnight last night for the Michigan recount to proceed immediately (ie, today). Despite appeals by MI’s AG and the Trump campaign, it is unlikely any will overturn this federal court order. Consider that the good news … Now for the bad news …
As reported tonight by The Guardian:
Broken polling machines may have put vote counts in question in more than half of Detroit’s precincts and nearly one-third of surrounding Wayne County, possibly throwing the Michigan recount into chaos.
If the discrepancies can’t be solved by recounting every paper ballot in question by hand, a recount in those precincts simply won’t happen. [Meaning the original, incorrect voting totals will stand]
www.theguardian.com/…
Wayne County is key to any even slim hope for Clinton to make up her 10,704 deficit in MI. She won WC bigley, and the county’s population is 1,759,335. If any large-scale errors exist, this is the pot of votes to look in first.
But voting in Wayne County on Election Day was a total mess …
Eighty-seven of Wayne County’s decade-old voting machines broke on election day, according to Detroit’s elections director, Daniel Baxter. He told the Detroit News, which first reported the story, that ballot scanners often jammed when polling place workers were trying to operate them. Every time a jammed ballot was removed and reinserted, he suspects the machine may have re-counted it.
Preliminary investigation by election officials in Wayne County found that 610 of the area’s 1,680 precincts could not reconcile the number of votes cast according to the machines with the number of ballots issued according to the electoral rolls. Detroit contains 662 of Wayne’s precincts; in 392 of those, the number of votes didn’t match up.
It gets worse. Problems are not confined to Wayne County. In other strong Hillary counties, real problems exist. According to The Detroit News:
In the first six hours of Ingham County’s recount Monday, six of 30 precincts from Lansing could not be recounted. One of the ballot containers had a hole in it, making it susceptible to tampering and not recountable, county Clerk Barb Byrum said.
Blame the city’s decade-old voting machines. Blame canvassers who certified the results of the election even though they had no explanation for why the numbers didn’t add up in those precincts. And very likely blame the mechanical delays and lines that led many folks to give up and go home without voting.
It’s a mess all around.