Calls for Janice Winfrey to resign as city clerk grow - 60% of Detroit precints wrong

[MikeyinBrooklyn]

Aside from systemic corruption, Detroit's biggest problem with local government has been sheer incompetence. Duggan has successfully shaken a lot of the cobwebs out of city government, but Winfrey's domain is out of his control, as she is an elected officer in her own right. She should probably resign, but whoever is in the job needs to modernize and make professional the entire operation. I am not sure that the next hack who takes the job will do that. I'd love to see Chief Craig become city clerk.

[Hermod]

What? Phone, Internet, Mail more secure than a piece of paper in a box? You must be kidding.

In fact, I think the only truly secure ballot is the hand-marked paper ballot in a box. You count the contents with witnesses. Its nearly foolproof. Any system involving electronics is a huge mistake.

The old bandaid on the finger bit with a bit of pencil lead inside. You just mark an extra vote on the ballot while counting it and thus render invalid a Republican ballot. That was an old UAW 'flying squad" trick as was putting a matchstick behind the GOP candidates lever on the old mechanical voting machine while your colleague distracted Miss Bluerinse, the GOP poll watcher for the precinct.

[Jimaz]

No citation?: fake news.

[snf]

Voter fraud by the demonrat partyis what it is. Plain and simple.i

[Wesley Mouch]

The old bandaid on the finger bit with a bit of pencil lead inside. You just mark an extra vote on the ballot while counting it and thus render invalid a Republican ballot. That was an old UAW 'flying squad" trick as was putting a matchstick behind the GOP candidates lever on the old mechanical voting machine while your colleague distracted Miss Bluerinse, the GOP poll watcher for the precinct.

Impressive tricks. People can be very clever.

Of course the electronic versions of these tricks also exist -- but are completely different -- yet exactly the same.

The advantage of paper over electronics is that most fraudulent acts take place under group supervision. A properly run paper ballot box is carefully watched by more than one person -- but of course that's no guarantee, is it. It just makes fraud harder.

I'll still take my chances with paper ballots in metal boxes over bits and bytes. The forensic evidence of fraud is easier to see on paper -- and at least paper doesn't erase so easily.

[Bham1982]

Voter fraud by the demonrat partyis what it is. Plain and simple.i

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Detroit is so incompetent they lose a ton of ballots, which you somehow spin to "democrat voter fraud". Newsflash: urban areas vote overwhelmingly Democrat, so much so that some precients have Republican voting at or near 0.

Any local incompetence in urban electioneering harms whomever is on the Dem party line and benefits the Rep. candidate, because Detroit is reliably Dem.

[JBMcB]

Except that never happens, and no one is going to appropriate the funds to do it.

Spoke too soon

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/new...udit/95358702/

So a recount procedure is, realistically, the only time we get to closely examine what actually happens with our ballots and how they are counted. I agree with the poster above that uncovering and rectifying such discrepancies would seem to be one of the basic reasons for, and functions of, a recount.

No, a recount just counts the ballots again. If there is a discrepancy, you need to do a root cause analysis to figure out what happened. That's what an audit is for. You don't need to recount all the ballots to do this, which is why the recount was a waste of time if this was your end goal.

Think of it this way - a recount would have cost, for the sake of argument, $5 million. It wouldn't tell you what is causing any discrepancies, only if there are any. Or you can just do the audit, which would probably cost less than $5 million, and would tell you what is causing the discrepancies.