Washtenaw County Clerk’s Office Lags Hours Behind Wayne, Oakland and Livingston Clerks in Posting Election Results

by P.D. Lesko

ANN ARBOR NEWS reporter Ben Freed posted a graphic of Cookie Monster tapping his fingers, then deleted the posting. Once again, the Washtenaw County Clerk finds himself at the center of a debate about handling ballots. At 11:40 p.m. Kestenbaum posted this to his Twitter feed in response to multiple Tweets from The Ann Arbor Independent asking why elections results were not being updated: “Here at Washtenaw County Clerk’s office, we’re having problems with the regular election reporting software.”

According to a staffer, the county’s IT staff were unable to fix the problem and so between 9:22 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. there were no updates posted and neither was there any notice posted to the County Clerk’s website about why the results of the election were not being released to the public in a timely manner.

Earlier in the summer, Kestenbaum’s office inexplicably left the name of a City Council candidate off the ballot.

The candidate, Robert Dascola, had sued the City of Ann Arbor so that his name could appear on the primary election ballot. Kestenbaum’s office asked for changes to be made to the ballot by a contractor after it had been proofed by candidates, as well as the Ann Arbor City Clerk. When the ballot came back neither Kestenbaum nor any other member of the county’s three-member Election Commission, noticed that Dascola’s name had been left off of the ballot.

To make matters worse, the error was not caught until after the Ann Arbor City Clerk had sent out hundreds of ballots and those ballots began to be sent back by voters.

The cost of Kestenbaum’s error was paid for by county taxpayers as well as the contractor.

On Tuesday Nov. 4, by 9:22 p.m. Kestenbaum’s office had posted election results from just five of the county’s 156 precincts. In addition to the five fully counted precincts, there were 15 partially counted precincts. The counted precincts amounted to just 3.21 percent of the precincts counted more than 3 hours after the polls closed.

Meanwhile, in surrounding counties, those County Clerks were posting unofficial elections results. In Wayne, Oakland and Livingston counties unofficial election results were posted well before 10 p.m. In Washtenaw County, officials still did not have 100 percent of the county’s 156 precincts counted by 1:48 a.m.

The race between David DeVarti and Mark Freeman, both running for the Washtenaw Community College Board of Trustees was too close to call at 2 a.m. The two top vote-getters in the race were Ruth Hatcher and Christina Fleming. There are, however, three openings on the Board of Trustees—Freeman is an incumbent and DeVarti a challenger. With 94.7 percent of precincts counted by 1:48 a.m., fewer than 90 votes separated DeVarti and Freeman.

The Washtenaw County Clerk, sometime after 11 p.m. began posting scanned pages of election results. The PDF reports, 30 pages long, were neither searchable nor could the information be copied and pasted electronically. As a result, at one point, thanks to having to type numbers of votes and percentages by hand for races with multiple candidates, The Ann Arbor News reported AAPS School Board candidate Jack Panitch had captured over 57,000 votes (Panitch captured under 8,000 votes total).

Likewise, The Ann Arbor Independent got a correction via Twitter from local blogger Ruth Kraut after posting incorrect information about which School Board candidates were in the lead.

At 2:28 a.m., County Clerk Kestenbaum posted to Twitter: “Good new: #Washtenaw County election results system is working again, with complete results.”

A few seconds later Kestenbaum Tweeted: “Minor bad news: it looks like we won’t have the Monroe County portion of Milan school district until tomorrow.”

Between 9:22 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., the Washtenaw County Clerk posted nothing to his own website, the County’s Facebook page or his own Twitter feed (@Kestenbaum) to alert the public that his office was unable to update election results.

At 1:30 a.m. Kestenbaum Tweeted “A nightmare: the system that writes #Washtenaw election results to the Web inexplicably died at 9:20 p.m.”

Even after Kestenbaum tweeted that the County election results system was working again with “complete results,” the link on the Clerk’s website took users to a 30-page PDF spreadsheet that showed 94.23 percent of precincts counted.

At 12:30 a.m. an Ann Arbor News reader pointed out that reporter Ben Freed’s live updates had been  “killing hours of time” because the results had come in so erratically.