#recount2016

The Michigan Supreme Court has shut down the last legal avenue to re-starting the statewide recount of presidential election ballots.

In a three-to-two decision, the court denied the appeal filed by Green Party nominee Jill Stein. She was trying to get an order to resume the recount after it was stopped by a lower court.

Republican Justices Robert Young and Joan Larsen removed themselves from the case because both are on President-elect Donald Trump's list of potential US Supreme Court nominees. But the remaining three Republican justices on the court voted to reject appeal, while the two Democrats dissented.

By Bill Palmer | December 6, 2016 

Was it merely old equipment which incompetent officials had failed to bother getting serviced, or was there something intentionally sinister going on? That’s the question now coming out of Michigan, where just as the statewide recount is getting underway, officials are finally admitting that the majority of vote counting machines in Detroit broke on election day. The stunning admission, which is getting virtually no national news coverage despite appearing in a major Detroit newspaper, casts doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s supposed narrow win in the state.

Even now, elections director Daniel Baxter appears to only be making the admission as part of a convoluted argument for why the ballots in those Detroit precincts can’t be recounted. He’s acknowledging that eighty-seven optical scanners in Detroit simply “broke” on the same day. But he and other Michigan officials are now making the argument that, because the broken machines resulted in different vote totals on the machines than on the precinct log books, state law means those ballots can’t be recounted.

The paradoxical argument, which is on full display in the Detroit News today, seems unlikely to pass the scrutiny of the federal judge who ruled on Sunday night that every county and precinct must immediately recount its votes by hand. But third party candidate Jill Stein, who initiated the recount and is paying for it, would need to take the matter back to the judge.

Meanwhile, the mere fact that fifty-nine percent of the vote counting machines in Michigan’s biggest city all broke on the same day is standing out as a stunning development. It calls into question why officials failed to publicly disclose this information until they needed it for their convoluted argument against recounting the majority of Detroit’s votes. With Detroit being 82% African-American and thus demographically likely to have heavily favored Hillary Clinton, it directly calls into question whether Donald Trump won Michigan.

By Bill Palmer | December 6, 2016

Pennsylvania hasn’t even done a statewide recount yet, and its vote totals are already shifting heavily in Hillary Clinton’s favor. Last week we reported that based on the revised numbers coming in from various Pennsylvania precincts, Donald Trump’s lead in the state had dropped from its original day-after-election total of 70,638 votes down to just 46,938 votes. And now it’s dropped even further.

As we’ve been documenting all along, it’s easy to follow to shift in numbers here. USA Today reported the original number last month, and the respected Decision Desk HQ subsequently reported the revised number on December 1st. And now that number has shifted again.

Decision Desk HQ now officially lists Donald Trump as having 2,970,796 votes in Pennsylvania, and Hillary Clinton as having 2,926,475 votes in the state. That’s now a margin of just 44,321 votes statewide, down from 46,938 five days ago, and down from 70,638 in November. These numbers are easily verified by clicking on the above blue bold-text source links, which lead to USA Today and Decision Desk HQ, as well as our own previous reporting.

Again, this is not a result of the statewide Pennsylvania recount that third party candidate Jill Stein has been fighting for in federal court. That recount hasn’t happened yet. These shifts are simply from precincts and counties voluntarily cleaning up their original vote totals, which in hindsight were wildly inaccurate. It means that Trump’s lead has already shrunk by 26,317 votes, or 37.5% of his original supposed lead in the state, based on voluntary local revisions alone. Considering the wild shifts in these totals, it makes the argument for a statewide Pennsylvania recount all the more strong.

In addition to suing Pennsylvania in federal court to try to get a judge to sign off on a statewide recount, she’s also looking to work with various precincts and counties in the state on voluntary recounts which might shrink Donald Trump’s lead even further. If his lead inches below 0.5%, it will trigger an automatic statewide recount under existing state law. These revisions have now shrunk his statewide lead from its original 1.2% down to 0.8% and now down to just over 0.7%, suggesting it may indeed drop to the requisite 0.5%. 

Half of Detroit votes likely ineligible for recount; MI Ct. of Appeals Halts Recount (UPDATED)

UPDATE:

Last night, the three-person panel that made up the Michigan Court of Appeals rejected the Green Party’s petition ruling against failed Green Party 2016 presidential candidate, Jill Stein on the grounds that Stein who garnered a mere 1% of Michigan is not an aggrieved party and did “not meet the qualifications for the request because she has no chance at winning the presidential election.”

By Bill Palmer | December 6, 2016

Just one day after a federal judge ordered that the state of Michigan recount its ballots in the 2016 presidential election to check for accuracy, officials are now claiming they can't recount the ballots in the most pivotal city because they screwed up the process too thoroughly the first time around. In fact, by their own admission, the majority of precincts in Detroit had ballot totals in the precinct poll books which didn’t match those of the voting machines.

In almost unbelievable claim, Michigan officials are insisting that they recount the majority of the votes in Detroit, specifically because these totals were incorrect the first time. It turns out Michigan had passed a state law forbidding recounts in the event that original numbers didn’t match up between the books and the machines. That law seems to have been rather transparently created for the express purpose of ensuring that vote counting fraud or incompetence can never be properly uncovered and appears to be unconstitutional on its face.

And yet, as of this moment, Michigan is flat out insisting that the ballots in 392 of the 662 precincts in Detroit simply can’t be recounted. As if to bluntly underscore the embarrassing nature of the Michigan 2016 election situation, the elections director for the city of Detroit admitted to local newspaper The Detroit News that “It’s not good” and went on to explain that eighty-seven vote counting machines broke on election day. This should come as news to the federal judge who already mandated that the recount take place; if he chooses to, he can rule that the Michigan laws covering this matter are unconstitutional, and force these votes to be recounted in accordance with his original ruling.