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In the hours after the polls closed on Election Day, Leelanau County’s website started to show unofficial results from the races. When the races were called, it looked as though Democrats had won in several local races.
But what the website showed was wrong, because over 3,000 votes did not initially get uploaded to Leelanau County’s website.
The county Board of Canvassers caught the discrepancy between what showed up on the website and paper records from voting machines when it was verifying the election results last week.
The Leelanau County Clerk fixed the error on Friday.
It’s now likely that a number of local races which Democrats initially appeared to win will flip to Republican candidates, including races for drain commissioner and county commissioners.
What happened?
Those 3,156 votes — the ones that weren’t uploaded to the county website at first — are all from the county’s early in-person voting site.
Leelanau County Clerk Michelle Crocker said county election officials uploaded the early in-person votes to the website, but they didn’t save, which affected the results on the county dashboard.
“We had those totals [on] paper, but they did not upload to the central management system that we use to let people know what the unofficial results are,” she said.
Essentially, the votes had already been counted, but they hadn’t been uploaded to the county’s election results dashboard where people were checking for unofficial returns.
Crocker said this kind of mishap is exactly what canvassing boards are designed to catch.
“We are so glad that the canvas saw what they saw, and we took corrective action as quickly as humanly possible,” she said.
Crocker said she called candidates after realizing the error would affect local races.
“We just can't emphasize it enough – the state said it, the county clerks say it: They're unofficial results until the canvas is complete and the results are certified,” she said.
Moving forward, Crocker said, the office’s list of checks and balances will include making sure the website matches the tabulated results.
But she said the system worked as it’s meant to.
“It is the job of the canvassers – we can’t perform a full canvas the night that we’re doing all of this,” Crocker said. “I want people to be assured that all the votes were tabulated; everything was accounted for. They just simply weren’t in that [unofficial results] report.”
Local impact
Among the races affected by the error were three seats on the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners. The board, which was evenly split due to a vacant seat ahead of the election, will likely change to Republican control.
Those seats represent Districts 2, 3 and 5. Now that the unofficial results accurately reflect the vote count, Republicans Mark Walter, Will Bunek and Alan Campbell are ahead of Democrats Scott Perry, Lois Bahle and incumbent Kama Ross.
One of the tightest races was District 3, where the updated results show Democrat Lois Bahle losing by a mere seven votes to Republican Will Bunek.
Bahle said that while she was ready to take a break from politics for a while, she would still call for a recount.
“I think I owe it to my constituents who supported me,” she said. “So we need to do a recount.”
Bunek said he felt for Bahle.
“We have to trust the election and work with what we have, whatever it is,” he said. “You know, it's just like the new early voting. I mean, we all have to get used to that, learn how to use it. And in this case, it really helped me.”
The updated results didn’t affect state-level races like the one for the 103rd State House seat, which Democratic incumbent Betsy Coffia won against Republican challenger Lisa Trombley.
Issues in other Michigan counties
Leelanau County wasn’t the only place in Michigan to experience problems with unofficial counts in the days following the election.
MLive reported that counties including Calhoun, Kent and Kalamazoo had issues as well.
Michael Morley, the director of the Center for Election Law at Florida State University, said these cases show that checks and balances are working as they should, but that counties like Leelanau can learn from their mistakes moving forward.
“I think they could certainly bolster public confidence if they're able to identify the source, or sources, of the problem and then identify how they are reforming their specific procedures,” Morley said. “It's unusual for there to be a problem, but that's the whole point of the canvassing process.”
Leelanau County Clerk Michelle Crocker said she expects election results to be certified and made official by the end of this week.
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