Michigan ballot count still unofficial

The results are in. Now the Board of Canvassers has 14 days to certify them.  They’re also trying to find out what took so long for votes to be counted.

“It was a lot of ballots to count. That’s the reality of it,” said Jonathon Kinloch, Vice Chair., Wayne County Board of Canvassers.

There were a lot of ballots – nearly 248,000 votes in Detroit and 537,000 in the rest of Wayne County.

Kinloch, was getting phone calls late into the night about the election.

“What’s going on with Detroit? What’s going on with Michigan?”

The ballot was two pages in Detroit, with 63 candidates for school board alone. With a lot of absentee ballots to also count, Detroit went well into the night.

“Election day workers basically had to manually put the absentee ballots into the tabulator,” said Kinloch. “You’re talking about over 100,000 ballots they had to tabulate.”

One precinct still wasn’t counted until Monday afternoon. It was only 447 ballots, but every vote counts. A technical glitch kept them from being counted right away.

Several neighboring cities in Wayne County also came in late – Livonia, Canton, and Brownstown.

Election workers are hopeful new technology - soon to be approved by the state – will make future elections faster and smoother.