Counting The Votes In Michigan

It is somewhat odd that an election candidate that received approximately 1 percent of the vote can demand a recount, but that is exactly what Green Party candidate Jill Stein did.  It’s not likely that the recount will change her status. In Michigan that request was denied, but when the votes were counted, the numbers were interesting.

Breitbart.com posted an article today the vote totals in Detroit.

The article reports:

Voting machines in 37 per cent of Detroit precincts recorded more votes than mathematically possible during November’s presidential election, according to records obtained by The Detroit News.

Reports obtained by the newspaper from Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett found that in 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, more votes had been counted than the number of people who had been marked as having voted, which might serve as evidence of voter fraud across the city.

Following the report, Michigan’s Secretary of State Ruth Johnson announced plans to conduct a full investigation into the irregularities. Detroit was one of the areas in which Hillary Clinton’s support was particularly strong.

The article further reports:

“We’re assuming there were (human) errors, and we will have discussions with Detroit election officials and staff in addition to reviewing the ballots,” said Michigan’s Elections Director Chris Thomas on Monday.

However, Krista Haroutunian, the chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, said that although “there’s always going to be small problems to some degree, we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit.”

“This isn’t normal,” she added.

Michigan was one of the last states to be counted, with Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton by 10,704 votes, taking him to his landslide electoral college victory of 306 votes compared to Clinton’s 232. He also became the first Republican to win the state since George W.H Bush in 1998.

There is a real need for a voter ID requirement in American elections, particularly in our large cities. Detroit was not the only city where more people voted than were eligible to vote. In one North Carolina city, it was discovered that 240 people listed a gravel parking lot with a shed as their address. Voter ID would have solved that problem. If Congress is really  concerned about the integrity of elections, they would support stronger voter ID laws in federal elections instead of chasing straw men about leaks that probably came from inside the DNC.