Recount Michigan: 5 Things We Learned About Duct Tape, Uncounted Ballots, Wilson Pickett, Eric Clapton and the 1 Percent

The Michigan presidential election recount is effectively over, barring an appeal of a federal judge’s reversal Wednesday of his earlier ruling that allowed it to go forward. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith said Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who requested the recount, did not prove fraud or that the state’s election system was vulnerable to hacking.

But it did reveal some surprises, and the flurry of lawsuits to stop the historic recount — the largest in Michigan’s history — wasn’t without some light moments.

Here are five things we learned from the recount:

No. 1: If a ballot box is sealed with duct tape — the secret weapon that saved the lives of the entire crew of Apollo 13 — the ballots can’t be counted. That happened in a precinct in Gibraltar, and Wayne County election officials said it would have been too easy for someone to slip in illegal ballots. Who knows? Maybe some of those millions of voters President-elect Donald Trump tweeted had cast ballots illegally infiltrated Gibraltar, ripped off the duct tape and bloated someone else’s total. In an era when facts may not even exist, no one knows if this did or didn’t happen. But back to the laws in Michigan: Ballot boxes should be locked with special seals with serial numbers, so the Gibraltar ballots weren’t counted.

No. 2: In fact, if there is such a thing anymore, numerous ballots were tossed out of the recount in precincts across Michigan, primarily in Wayne County, where about a third of them were not eligible for recounts. Why? Because the names of voters in poll books and the number of ballots in the non-duct-tape-sealed boxes didn’t match. In Wayne County seat Detroit, about half of the ballots weren’t eligible for the recount. Someone tweeted about it, and it wasn't the Twitter-loving president-elect.

Something is weird, though. In Detroit Precinct 152, the poll book listed more than 300 voters, but only 50 ballots were found in the properly sealed box. “The state needs to investigate whether or not the cause of the ballot count discrepancies in Detroit and elsewhere throughout the state are the result of fraud or negligence,” state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, a Republican from Canton, told the Detroit Free Press.

No. 3: The “1 percent” doesn’t mean what you think it does. The phrase has been used in the past to describe income inequality in the United States, but in the Michigan recount, those opposing it repeatedly referred to Stein as the “1 percent candidate” because she only received about 1 percent of the vote in the Michigan. They also referred to her “1 percent temper tantrum.” In fairness, though, Stein never suggested that a recount would change her vote total.

No. 4: Duct tape (See No. 1) will fix about anything that can be fixed, but apparently not the 87 optical scanners that malfunctioned in Detroit. According to election officials, many of the scanners jammed when voters tried to feed their ballots into them, which could have skewed vote counts if the frustrated voter tried to push in the ballot too many times.

More Patch Coverage on Recounts

• Swing-State Hacking Fears Fuel Talk of Recounts
• It's Official: Donald Trump Wins Michigan; President-Elect Could Fight Recount
• Jill Stein Plans Court Action to Force Hand Recount of Wisconsin Ballots
• Jill Stein Officially Asks for Michigan Presidential Vote Recount
• Donald Trump, Jill Stein File Lawsuits on Michigan Recount
• Judge Orders Michigan Recount to Begin Monday
• Michigan Republican Party Appeals Ruling Ordering Recount to Start
• Michigan Vote Recount: Half of Detroit’s Ballots May Not Qualify
• Federal Judge Reverses Course, Orders Halt to Recount

No. 5: Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette just loves rock 'n' roll. He got into some trouble with purists, though, when he called Goldsmith’s order for the recount to begin Monday “a midnight hour, Eric Clapton, stealth ruling” (the judge issued the ruling around midnight Sunday). Faster than Trump can fire off a tweet lambasting Alec Baldwin’s “Saturday Night Live” parodies, Twitter users pointed out that Detroit-born Wilson Pickett co-wrote and recorded “In the Midnight Hour” and took it to the top of the Billboard charts in 1965.

But the state attorney general gave a politician’s answer (you might think Schuette is running for governor or something): He loves both musicians, and his quote was a hybrid that referenced not only Pickett’s song, but also British-born Clapton’s “After Midnight.”

But, to his credit, Schuette didn’t suggest Michiganders should just let those ballots hang out.

Photo by Lance Fisher via Flickr Commons