Checking The Integrity Of Our Elections

Yesterday The Detroit News posted an article about some problems with the Presidential Election in Detroit.

The article reports:

County clerk officials on Thursday released a memo to State Elections Director Chris Thomas that said 95 poll books from the 662 precincts weren’t available at the start of the canvass, which began the day after the Nov. 8 election. Five of those poll books, which contain the names of voters and ensure the integrity of elections, were never delivered to county canvassers and presumably remain missing.

The revelation comes atop other irregularities that have prompted a state audit. Among other issues, The Detroit News reported this week that voting machines registered more votes than they should have in one-third of all city precincts.

“I’m not happy with how Detroit handled this election at all,” said Krista Hartounian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, which certified the election.

“We had been seeing improvement, but this one was different. This one was off.”

Canvassers compare poll books with printouts from voting machines to ensure the number of people who signed in to vote match the number of ballots cast.

The article goes on to list other irregularities that occurred during the election. Please follow the link above to read the details.

The article continues:

The M100s, which are used in 55 percent of Michigan’s precincts, have a spotty reputation. In 2008, then-Oakland County Clerk Ruth Johnson, who is now secretary of state, urged federal officials to investigate after the optical scanners improperly counted 8 percent of ballots during testing.

“The same ballots, run through the same machines, yielded different results each time,” Johnson wrote to the Election Assistance Commission, an agency that administers federal payments to states to buy voting machines.

Johnson wrote that vendors blamed dust and debris inside the machines. A Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency report noted the machines still run on the Windows XP operating system, which Microsoft has not sold since 2008 and for which it stopped providing support and security updates in 2014.

I don’t know how much of this voter ID would cure, but it might be a step in the right direction.