Did you hear the one about the city clerk who faced a tough re-election challenge because she has been incapable of running a clean city election, then won another 4-year term after a recount in her race revealed another round of glaring incompetence?

Well, in the city of Detroit that’s not a joke, that’s a news item.

Clerk Janice Winfrey, barely won re-election last month after a tight campaign that focused substantial criticism on the botched election process she oversaw in 2016. When her opponent in this November’s city elections, Garlin Gilchrist II, sought a recount, the review of the vote was again set aside – just as in 2016 — in many precincts because the ballots were so badly mishandled.

In 33 Election Day precincts and absentee voter counting boards, the votes could not be recounted because of missing ballots or mismatched tabulations. That meant that 20 percent of the partial recount requested by Gilchrist was called off.

In one precinct, only five of the 145 ballots cast on Election Day were secured in a proper container. The rest were tossed into a box that included supplies for poll workers.

This debacle comes after Winfrey and her election team made national news in December 2016 when their mistake-filled efforts were a leading reason that the courts halted the recount of the presidential election in Michigan.

At that time, discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 Detroit precincts, or nearly 60 percent. The greatest humiliation for the city was that two-thirds of those precincts had more votes cast than the number of registered voters.

Prior to 2016, Winfrey, the city’s chief elections official, had faced constant criticism due to malfunctioning voting machines, polling locations that opened late on Election Day, poorly trained poll workers, long lines at voting sites, and numerous voting irregularities.

Heading into this year’s city vote, Winfrey, first elected in 2005, claimed that past problems had been fixed through improved poll worker training and new voting machines.

But Gilchrist, who lost to the incumbent on Nov. 7 by about 1,400 votes, called for the recount after hearing reports of “chaos” in the absentee voting process and irregularities at about 60 voting precincts.

On Friday, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers expressed concerns about the voting problems uncovered by the recall, yet the members had no choice but to certify the election and declare Winfrey the official winner.

Detroit voters had, apparently, chosen Winfrey to run the city’s elections process for the next four years, including in 2021, when the clerk will again be up for re-election.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2017/12/08/detroit-clerk-recount/108439064/

https://www.politicscentral.org/low-can-bar-go-detroit-elections/

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