Democrat wants recount of Oakland clerk race

Oakland County clerk Ruth Johnson and Democratic candidate Sheila Smith

The tight race for election administrator in Oakland County may yield an audit of vote-counting machines that worried the current clerk.

Sheila Smith, the Democratic candidate for county clerk, told Michigan Messenger that she will ask for a recount in her apparently unsuccessful race against incumbent Republican Ruth Johnson.

Johnson questioned the integrity of the county’s vote-tallying machines in an Oct. 24 letter to the federal Election Assistance Commission. The letter was not published by the agency until election eve. In the letter, Johnson warned that 8 percent of the county’s ES&S M100 vote tabulators had failed pre-election logic and accuracy testing. Johnson expressed concern that machine malfunctions — said to be caused by dust build-up — could skew vote totals.

“My understanding is that the problem could occur and election workers would have no inkling the ballots were being misread,” she wrote.

The margin in the clerk race stands at less than 1 percent, with Johnson the winner.

On Election Day, Johnson’s office in Pontiac revealed that no state or federal agencies had taken action to address her concerns and that her office had plans to conduct a hand-count of ballots.

Oakland has not finished tabulating the election, Tracy Ward, spokeswoman for the county, told Michigan Messenger. Ward would not say whether any of the ballots are being hand-counted. She said some overseas ballots delivered that day had yet to be counted. The current count is 294,909 for Johnson and 289,287 for Smith.

A call to Oakland County elections director Joe Rozell for details on the counting process was not returned.

Voting rights were a key issue in her campaign, said Smith, who took a leave from work as political director at Michigan Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to run for clerk, and a recount in Oakland could be an important way to address citizen concerns about the controversial ES&S M100 machines.

“My platform was voter protection and education, and now I am taking it to another level,“ she said. “When you come that close, you need to test it. “

Smith said that if she were serving as clerk and found herself in a very close race after publicly questioning the counting machines, she would do a recount.

She said she is consulting with her staff and attorneys and with the Oakland County Democratic Party on how to proceed.

A Thursday Detroit Free Press report on the strong Democratic gains in Oakland County, “Democrats bust GOP’s hold in Oakland,” described Smith as “little-known and underfunded.”

On Election Day, Nancy Banks, city clerk for the Oakland County city of Southfield, told Michigan Messenger that her community did experience pre-election machine failures but said that the machines were serviced and in working order by the time voting began. “I would not have held this election if I did not have 100 percent confidence in our ability to count the vote,” Banks said.

But tabulators did break down in Southfield and in other parts of Oakland County later that day, Ward told Michigan Messenger.

One national watchdog organization, OurVoteLive.org told the Detroit News on Election Day: “Voters are reporting from almost every corner of [Michigan] that the machines they are trying to feed their ballots into are malfunctioning and giving them error messages. That’s not good.”

Oakland has until Nov. 18 to certify the election, according to recount protocol information from the secretary of state’s office, and Smith will then have six days to request a recount.

If she does, the ballots will be counted by hand and Smith will be required to foot the bill, expected to be around $6,500. This money is returned if the election is reversed.

Todd A. Heywood contributed to this report.