Vote early and often

Major problem with Detroit's ballots: Votes being counted more than once

Rob covered this issue in large part yesterday while I was on the road, but as a second-day followup I wanted to highlight what could be a major - and until now, largely unrealized - problem with the administration of elections in major urban counties that vote heavily Democratic. Michigan’s recount has obviously hit some major legal hurdles, but it’s also hit a huge administrative one: Wayne County, which votes overwhelmingly Democratic and is Michigan’s largest county, can’t seem to reconcile the hand count of ballots with what the voting machines indicated. And it’s not even close, with 59 percent of precincts showing the discrepancy.

The leading problem, it appears? An awful lot of the ballots were counted twice: Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month. Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662. According to state law, precincts whose poll books don’t match with ballots can’t be recounted. If that happens, original election results stand. “It’s not good,” conceded Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city of Detroit. He blamed the discrepancies on the city’s decade-old voting machines, saying 87 optical scanners broke on Election Day. Many jammed when voters fed ballots into scanners, which can result in erroneous vote counts if ballots are inserted multiple times. Poll workers are supposed to adjust counters to reflect a single vote but in many cases failed to do so, causing the discrepancies, Baxter said.

So let me see if I have this straight: If we’re to believe the explanation Mr. Baxter offers, 87 voting machines malfunctioned in Election Day. Now Detroit is a big city, but 87 machines malfunctioning? And even if that’s true, the city has a protocol in place for dealing with the problem. When voters insert the ballot into the machine a second time because it didn’t appear to take the first time - thus counting the ballot twice - the poll workers are supposed to adjust the count. But they didn’t! Now let’s think about this for a second. You’ve got a heavily Democratic city where you know almost everyone is voting for Hillary. You know that ballots counted twice will in almost every case result in extra votes for Hillary. You’re supposed to correct that. Hey, we’ll get around to that right after we clean the toilets and put away those sugar cubes sitting around in the break room. You could argue whether this is voter fraud or merely administrative incompetence, but it’s clearly a problem in the system that will benefit Democrat candidates if not corrected. Most of the fraud talk focuses on people walking in and voting as other people, or on noncitizens being allowed to register and vote. Not much attention has been paid thus far to election officials knowingly letting votes be counted twice. (By the way, as you’ll see in the story, there is one other county in Michigan where similar problems were found, and that was Genesee County - also a heavily Democratic county whose largest city is Flint.)

So it turns out this idiotic Jill Stein recount has not been completely useless after all. No, it’s not going to change anything. Donald Trump won Michigan and won the election, and he’s going to be our next president. But the recount did lead to the discovery of these problems with voting in Wayne and Genesee Counties, and it’s worth asking whether similar shenanigans are going on major urban areas around the country. How many blue states are only blue because they have a major urban area that votes overwhelmingly Democratic and overtakes the mostly Republican areas in the rest of the state? Michigan certainly was one until it turned red this year. What if this sort of nonsense is common in major, Democrat-run cities? What if Democrat election workers know full well that a lot of votes are counted twice and that they’re supposed to adjust the count, but hey, who has the time? We don’t know from this one incident that it’s a massive, widespread problem. But we never even knew to look for the problem before now. Obviously major cities are going to continue to vote Democratic - cheating or no cheating - but if they’re padding their vote totals to influence to results of their states, that needs to be investigated and addressed. This sounds like a high priority for Jeff Sessions and the Trump Justice Department. And I eagerly await claims from the left that investigating the multiple counting of votes is racist, because you know it’s coming.



Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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