As an official election inspector for Ann Arbor, it was my duty to help assure a free and fair election. I believe we did a good job. The challengers from both parties agreed; we also removed cordial with various poll watchers, including those from the Moveon PAC.

There were 1477 ballots cast where I worked from a base of 1812 registered voters. There were 446 straight Democratic votes and 117 straight Republican votes. Kerry beat Bush 1158 to 300.

Invalid writeins are my lasting concern. In Michigan, a write in does not count if it does not refer to a registered candidate. This is an obscure law. It took effort to convince other poll workers that we needed to inspect each ballot to insure that the machine tabulated the votes properly.

We discovered one ballot where the voter’s pen strayed and accidentally cast a writein vote for Board of Regents. When we saw that the write-in vote had no candidate’s name, we determined that the machine had improperly interpreted the ballot as overvoted. We corrected the machine tapes by writing “+1” by the names of Maynard and Debusschere.

Another ballot had a stray dot which the machine interpreted as a preference for a no-name write in candidate; two ballots contained clearly expressed preferences for a no-name write in candidate. Those ballots were marked with straight party preferences for the Democratic party. We reverted those invalid writein votes to the Democratic cadidates, adding one vote to County Treasurer McClary and two votes to Council Member Easthope.

We discovered no huge number of votes. Still, when reporting vote totals, I insist on perfection, not close enough. Further, close races do occur; I am very comfortable that any recount of our precinct will validate our results.