The Michigan presidential election recount turned up some ballot irregularities after all, but not the kind Green Party nominee Jill Stein was looking for.

In Detroit, a Democratic stronghold where Hillary Clinton won 95 per cent of the vote, voting machines in one-third of the election precincts counted more ballots than the number of people recorded as walking in line to cast them.

The Wayne County clerk's office reported that only 236 of Detroit's 662 voting precincts had ballot totals and registration records that matched.

The rest were off by at least 1 vote. One hundred and forty-four had too few votes. But the largest number, 248, had too many.

Fully 52 of those precincts recorded at least five too many votes.

Green Party candidate Jill Stein (left) paid for a partial recount of Michigan's presidential votes and one giant set of irregularities emerged – in precincts that favored Hillary Clinton by wide margins

Donald Trump won the Michigan contest last month by more than 10,000 votes

The 'irregular' precincts were excluded from the recounts that proceeded until a federal judge ordered it stopped a week ago.

Stein won barely 1 per cent of the vote. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith ruled that she hadn't shown that she would have been harmed by any Election Day miscounting, and could offer only speculation that the vote totals might have been off.

President-elect Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Michigan by 10,704 votes, a difference of 0.2 per cent.

Election officials told the Detroit News that the depth of the voting irregularities surprised them.

'There's always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn't expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn't normal,' Wayne County Board of Canvassers chairwoman Krista Haroutunian told the newspaper.

'We're assuming there were [human] errors, and we will have discussions with Detroit election officials and staff in addition to reviewing the ballots,' state elections director Chris Thomas added.

It's still unclear just how many votes may have been recorded in error throughout Detroit. That's because elections officials stop counting a voting machine's inaccuracy after the first five are identified.

Ballots like this one in Michigan were counted and recounted, and canvassers found that in hundreds of precincts there were more votes cast than people who signed in on Election Day

Officials were quick to dismiss any suggestion that election fraud could explain why so many precincts saw more votes cast than were authorized.

Washtenaw County Elections Director Ed Golembiewski told the Detroit News that over-votes and under-votes tend to cancel each other out.

'It's usually human error,' he said.