The discrepancies in Leelanau County’s unofficial election results were not caused by a computer error, according to county Clerk Michelle Crocker. Between Election Day and Nov. 8, the unofficial results were updated to include over 3,100 ballots that were not counted, changing the results of several races.
Instead of including 3,156 early inperson voting ballots, the clerk’s office inadvertently reported just under 1,600 sample ballots from an Oct. 17 elections accuracy in their Statement of Votes Cast, Crocker said. The sample ballots have been replaced with actual votes on the unofficial election results webpage as of Friday.
“I still have total faith in the election process. There is no conspiracy going on here. This shows that the process works,” Crocker said. “The canvassers … saw where they didn’t line it up. That is their job: to find exactly what they found.”
The Leelanau County board of canvassers found this mistake late Nov. 8 when the canvassers compared the Statement of Votes Cast sent to Lansing with paper receipts from the tabulator used at the county government center in Suttons Bay during early voting from Oct. 26 to Nov. 3.
The canvassers saw that the total number of votes in the unofficial election results from Wednesday was off by 1,574 votes. And with the relatively even spread of votes in the rows for early inperson voting, it rapidly became clear that these were sample ballots still stored in the system from testing about three weeks earlier.
The county’s election commission ran an accuracy test in October by feeding hundreds of sample ballots through a tabulator to confirm it would accurately report the results. The test showed 100% accurate results, but unfortunately, no one cleared the data fields from this test.
Crocker said they expected the early in-person votes to “override” these fields. But when the election administrators contacted their vendor, ElectionSource, this weekend, they learned they had been told via an instruction manual to purge, reject, or delete the data from the accuracy test before the election.
So, a Statement of Votes Cast automatically generated from the data stored in the tabulators used the sample ballots from testing instead of the early in-person votes from the government center. Luckily the early in-person votes were still recorded separately on receipt paper, so when the discrepancies were discovered Friday, it was simply a matter of replacing numbers.
According to Crocker, the state says this was all the result of human error. But to the credit of local election workers and administrators, the mistake was discovered during the canvassing process before sample ballots were mistakenly certifi ed instead of real votes.
“In the future, instead of hoping for an override, we’ll have to do a purge and delete of any prior testing that’s done with the system,” Crocker said.
This mistake led to a swing of 4,738 votes. But Crocker said Tuesday that the Nov. 8 unofficial election results, which can be found on leelanau.gov, will now likely reflect the final outcomes of these races.
The board of canvassers still needs to consider overseas ballots and write-in votes. Crocker said that there are not enough Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment ballots in the relevant district to affect the outcome of the closest county commissioner race: District no. 3, where Republican Will Bunek is seven votes ahead of Democrat Lois Bahle.
Commenting on these events, Leelanau County board Chairman Ty Wessell, who was recently re-elected as the Democrat candidate in District No. 4, said these results were not what he hoped for, but promised the board will continue to work together to represent all county residents.
“What happened this week provides clear evidence that our election process works. I absolutely know that we can trust the final results. If the numbers don’t change and the Dems have three seats on the BOC, we all will work hard to ensure that we have the right conversations about issues that matter, work across the aisle, and get things done,” Wessell said.
Wessell added that the new board will “keep our tax rate low, serve our residents and deliver on all of the mandated responsibilities of County government.”
District No. 5 Commissioner Kama Ross, who is now shown as behind challenger Alan Campbell in her election, had sharper words for Clerk Michelle Crocker at the Nov. 12 board of commissioners’ executive session. She said this incident put the county “in a very bad light that I’m embarrassed to say that I’m any part of.”
“Three of my constituents … that put themselves out there to run for township offices were not even attempted to be contacted by anyone from your office. As a leader myself, before I would talk with any media … I would have called those people. I would have answered their emails,” Ross said. “This action that you have not done – by not doing a better job of communicating and educating stakeholders – is very disappointing.”
“Thank you for your comments. We’re all embarrassed by other peoples’ behavior at different times, so thank you for your comments,” Crocker responded.
