ONE SINGLE VOTE separates Republican House primary leaders in 1st Congressional Dist (MI) Unofficial

[Land Shark]

http://miboecfr.nictusa.com/election/results/10PRI/06001000.html

At the above link, you can see that the unofficial results (expected to be official sometime today) show a margin of a single vote in the Republican primary for the US House in Michigan's 1st Congressional District. Meanwhile, AP in a somewhat earlier report had the margin at 102 votes.

The top two vote getters in a wide field have 27, 091 (Dan Benishek) and 27,090 (Jason Allen) votes. Both candidates are claiming victory. See http://www.uppermichiganssource.com/news/story.aspx?id=491932

On the Democratic side, an early challenger to incumbent Bart Stupak dropped out, leaving a single Democratic candidate on the that side of the aisle, (Gary McDowell) and this unopposed primary race surprisingly remained so even though Rep. Stupak announced his retirement, making the seat an open seat. McDowell, of course, won the nomination.

The 1st District is located in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and northern lower Michigan.

The lion's share of jurisdictions used ES&S "AutoMark" secret vote-counting scanners. These scanners take a digital picture of sorts of a paper ballot, and then count THE PICTURE, or purport to. As with all such secret counts, there's no evidence available that anything other than a rough count of BALLOTS (as opposed to VOTES within Ballots) was done, we just get the magic numbers from the black boxes and it could easily have been a program making up numbers to roughly total the number of ballots... I'm not saying that is definitely the case here, what I am saying is that, as a matter of scientific and statistical fact, there's no evidence that any count took place at all (because if it did it's all in electrons on hard drives and the operations of that are all trade secret and not available even to election officials, much less the public).

It's not entirely clear what's going to happen at this point, but if the race is certified per the unofficial results, it would appear that Jason Allen, as a loser by one reported vote, would have the burden of filing. One news source says it's likely a recount will occur. See http://www.uppermichiganssource.com/news/story.aspx?id=491932 Of course, a recount of a stuffed ballot box will give the same erroneous result every single time, yet people seem to think recounts are some sort of fail-safe check and balance. In reality, all they do is check against ONE SLICE of election error -- counting (including ballot interpretation) errors.

It may be that Michigan's somewhat unique method of "provisional" voting will come into play here. There's a procedure for casting a type of disputed ballot that is counted, but in the event of a contest or issue, those ballots are kept segregated and can thus be backed out of the totals. If this happens, it's like I've long thought: One's vote counts when it's provisional in Michigan, except when it really counts.

PS I'm so liberal ;) I think even Republican votes should be counted fair and square in an OPEN, HONEST election with publicly observed vote counts...

[Land Shark]

1. The OP should also state that the scanners are ES&S M100s at some precincts

The "Automark" is the disabled access touchscreen voting system, also present at my and many other polling places. They also use the GEMS tabulator county-wide in my county. In any event, the brand name of the scanner doesn't affect any of the text in the OP. (doesn't matter, in other words :) )

[livvy]

2. A manual handcount is in order.

It wouldn't take that long to do with those numbers. And I agree with you. It doesn't matter which party is involved...guess I'm a liberal nut too! (But you probably already knew that...long time no "see"!) :fistbump: and a howdy, too!

[Motown_Johnny]

3. I think all elections should be fair also, but I don't mind them falling apart

over a questionable vote count

[Yeggo]

4. Worried..

This one may be getting away from McDowell a bit. Not sure why on earth you release an internal that shows you down by 2 (which really means you're down high single digits). Smacks of desperation:

http://bit.ly/dmMMrq