The University of Michigan Board of Regents results are wrong. The State of Michigan received wrong results from Washtenaw County. Washtenaw County inaccurately tallied the results of Ann Arbor’s Ward 5 Precinct 9.

This is because our County Clerk failed to modify electronically reported results based on improper writein votes. A larger problem is that Ann Arbor does not train election inspectors to look for such modifications.

I spoke about the votes in question here. (FYI, I spoke about the election experience here and here.) Here’s what happened:

• One voter did not quite understand the instructions. Instead of connecting arrows to the right of candidates’ names, (s)he crossed out entire candidate names. One of the lines (s)he drew to vote for a candidate in the right column strayed into an arrow in the center column. The arrow errantly marked indicated a vote for a writein candidate for UM Regent. That voter also selected two valid candidates in that vote-for-two office.
  
• The voter fed his/her ballot into the vote tabulator. The machine saw three votes in the vote-for-two category of UM Regent. It made a unique beep, spit the ballot back at the voter, and printed a message indicating that the ballot was overvoted for the office of UM Regent. We told the voter that s/he overvoted UM Regent and that the machine would not tally that office. We asked whether the voter would prefer a fresh ballot or would prefer to cast the ballot as-is. The voter chose to cast the ballot as-is. We pressed the “3” button on the keypad; the machine accepted the ballot and counted all the votes except for the UM Regent votes.
  
• Upon closing, a member-of-another-party and I studied the machine tape printout. We also examined all the ballots with writein votes. One of the ballots we studied was the ballot mentioned above. We determined that the machine saw three votes for UM Regent on that ballot. We noticed that one of the overvotes was for an invalid writein candidate. As per Michigan Law (in the Special Handling section, near the bottom), we “undid” that writein vote. We noted that the machine was wrong; the ballot was not overvoted. We wrote “+1” on the official machine tape printout next to the names of two candidates selected by that voter.
  
• We sealed everthing up and delivered our materials to City Hall. The City Clerk sent the tape to the County Clerk.
  
• The County Clerk’s office loaded the electronic results from our machine’s memory pack. They modified those electronic results based on the “+1”s on our tape printout. They failed to notice our manually written “+1”s in the office of UM Regent.
  
• The County Board of Canvassers examined our tape. They certified the election without catching the County Clerk’s omission.
  
• The county sent the incorrect results to the state.
  

Two votes may not seem like much, but to me these two votes are symptomatic of a structural flaw in the system which needs to be corrected.

One structural flaw is at the precinct level. Election day is long enough as it is, and election inspectors make enough mistakes without having to examine writein votes. The city did not train us to examine them October 28 and likely will not train us to examine them in the future. My guess is that Ann Arbor tallies were off by 200-250 votes. IMO, barring a change in the law, I would expect this error to continue.

Note: this is 200-250 total votes. Many of these “lost” votes canceled each other out. Many of these are probably in offices where the incumbent ran unopposed. Further, I arrived at the 200-250 estimate by multilpying the number of precincts in Ann Arbor, 48, by the number of write in votes we found, 5. If other precincts did look for invalid writeins, this number is overstated.

Another structural flaw is at the county level. I spoke with people in the County Clerk’s office. They examined the official tape marked with the “+1”s and agreed that the results were off. (They also printed out a copy of my most recent Command Post post to assist their efforts.) IMO, I expect them to change their procedures to guard against such mistakes in the future; this may prompt Ann Arbor to change their policies.