Michigan House panel weighs bills reforming election recounts

Election Integrity Force recount location in Grand Rapids on December 13, 2022 | Allison R. Donahue

The Michigan House Elections Committee heard testimony on Tuesday about Senate Bills 603 and 604, which would modify the recount process, filing fees for recounting and sentencing guidelines for certain Michigan election law violations that deal with recounts.

Senate Bill 603 would allow recounts of precincts that have a mismatch between the number of ballots and the ballots issued to voters recorded in a polling place’s log or the ballots that were tabulated.

“Under this bill, in cases where the number of ballots issued as shown in the poll book, the number of ballots tabulated as shown on the tabulator tape, or the number of ballots cast as shown by the county canvas are out of balance — but are out of balance at the same or fewer at the time of the recount — under my bill, the precincts can now be recounted as long as there is a satisfactory explanation and a sworn affidavit in a form prescribed by the Secretary of State,” said state Sen. Stephanie Chang (D-Detroit), sponsor of the bill.

If a candidate for office files for a recount petition, that candidate must file that recount petition in good faith and the number of votes requested to be recounted must at minimum be greater than the difference in votes between the petitioning candidate and the winning candidate, Chang said.

Senate Bill 603 also clarifies that county canvassers would not investigate fraud. 

Rep. Jay DeBoyer (R-Clay) said he was against the bills taking away the authority from the bipartisan boards that certify election results to investigate any potential election fraud during a recount. 

Chang said that those canvassers have never had that authority and if someone believes there is election fraud, they can ask law enforcement to investigate. 

“The bill defines a recount as an administrative process to determine votes cast for a candidate or ballot question. It makes clear that a recount is not an audit or investigation,” Chang said. “As we all know from four years ago [the 2020 election], those words are not interchangeable and this clarification of the law is important to minimize confusion among voters.”

Joe Rozell, director of elections for Oakland County, also said he thinks it’s best to leave criminal investigations to law enforcement.

“You can still get a recount by requesting that there’s an error. And if we move into the recount and we do discover fraud, we’re going to report it,” he said.

The legislation would apply a felony charge for any individual who willfully interferes with a recount or activities relating to a recount. The law currently applies to only officers, assistants, clerks or employees.

Erica Peresman from Promote the Vote said that Senate Bills 603 and 604 would bring more transparency and accuracy to elections and would eliminate confusion about recounts. She said these bills are a “big step forward for our recount law.”

“There might be a tabulator jam and the poll workers get busy and they don’t note it in the poll book. Or a poll worker might fail to properly log a spoiled ballot or provisional ballot in the poll book. These are human errors that happen sometimes in precincts and they might cause the precinct to be out of balance,” she said. “But why that would make a precinct uncountable in a close election has always been a mystery to me. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Senate Bill 603 would also raise recount filing fees. This would not only help boards of canvassers better afford recounts, but discourage candidates and ballot question committees from requesting recounts for elections with wide margins, in which a recount was unlikely to change the result of an election, the bill says.

“FairVote issued a report recently that pointed out that recounts conducted when the margin is not actually close can sometimes be frivolous and can do more harm than good in terms of actually ensuring confidence of voters in our process,” Chang said.

Chang said the bills would “achieve critical goals of protecting the security of every vote.”

“The bills modernize our recount law and assist our county clerks with greater clarity and a fee structure that makes sense. These bills enhance the voices of voters and anyone who claims otherwise is simply incorrect,” she said.

The panel did not vote on the bills

House Bills 5699, 5700, 5701 and 5702 were approved at the House Elections Committee meeting Tuesday. The package of bills would modify the term of office for township, village and city officials to ensure that elected officials are sworn into office no sooner than Dec. 1. 

Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou (D-East Lansing), one of the sponsors of the bills, said that in a lot of cases, individuals are taking office in the week following the election. 

 Tsernoglou said the certification of elections is becoming very difficult to happen before Dec. 1 due to new provisions for military and overseas ballots. So, the bills would account for this and provide more time for elections to be certified. 

“This is really just a commonsense change to ensure that the elections are actually certified before we have people taking office,” Tsernoglou said.

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