Four Counties In MI Find Over 26K Votes Days After The Election—Several Seats Flip From Democrat To Republican, Including One MI House Seat

On Friday, the state of Michigan, which arguably has the most untrustworthy Secretary of State in America, added 26,662 unreported votes to its unofficial vote total from four counties after canvassers reportedly discovered the stunning discrepancies.

Kent County, formerly a red county, discovered a whopping 13,795 unreported votes. Kalamazoo County, home to Western MI University and Kalamazoo College, discovered 6,691 previously unreported votes. Calhoun County blamed their discovery of 4,602 votes on a “software glitch.” When northern Michigan’s Leelanau County’s results were first revealed, it looked like Democrats had won almost every race, which would solidify the belief that Democrats were able to turn the popular vacation community solidly blue. But not so fast—days after the Nov. 5 election, 1,574 unreported votes were discovered that had not added to the original count, flipping almost every race thought to have been won by a Democrat to a Republican candidate.

In Leelanau County, several key races, like the three Leelanau County board of commissioners spots, showed Democrats sweeping Republicans at the polls. The important local drain commissioner, which previously showed the Democrat winning by a landslide, was flipped to give the Republican candidate a resounding victory.

We spoke with the newly elected drain commissioner, Tim O’Non, whose race flipped from Democrat Faith Hoekstra to Republican. Although Leelanau County claims they discovered 1,574 unreported votes, Timothy O’Non somehow picked up 1,736 new votes for a total of 8,736 votes over his Democratic opponent Faith Hoekstra, whose vote count currently sits at 8,093.

On Friday, Tim O’Non spoke with the Leelanau County Clerk, Michelle Crocker, who informed him that instead of losing his race, he was now winning by a small margin. Tim’s wife, Republican Trustee candidate Kerry O’Non, has now also been declared the winner of her race by ten votes, with 452 votes being awarded to Republican Jolyn Arins, whose new vote total is 458.

Michelle Crocker, the Leelanau County Clerk for decades, told Mr. O’Non that the tabulator had a “software glitch” and that the votes that would typically be uploaded into the final count didn’t happen. “She didn’t see any issues with their procedures,” Tim O’Non told us, adding that he respects the county clerk who has served for three decades.

Leelanau Enterprise was first to report on the over 1,500 ballots that were not recorded in the initial Nov. 5 general election, stating that the new vote discovery could change the outcome of three Leelanau County board of commissioners races and may show that the Republican Party reclaimed the board majority.

Republican candidates Mark Walter, Will Bunek, and Alan Campbell now appear to be the winners of the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th districts. Previously, their Democrat opponents – Scott Perry, Lois Bahle, and incumbent commissioner Kama Ross – were the unofficial winners of these races.

Moreover, these results suggest some township races may have different outcomes than previously reported. And Faith Hoekstra, the Democrat who appeared to be winning the race for county drain commissioner, is now behind Republican candidate Tim O’Non in the unofficial results, with O’Non at 8,736 votes to Hoekstra’s 8,093 votes.

Leelanau County’s unofficial election results page was updated Friday evening at about 7 p.m. to include over a thousand ballots that were not recorded, according to county Clerk Michelle Crocker. The total number of ballots cast increased from 16,253 to 17,827, which was enough to shift the scales in several elections.

Voters in Centerville Township were asked to choose two trustees from a field of four candidates. The candidates with the most votes initially appeared to be Democrats Paul Winston and Rolf von Walthausen. But with the early in-person votes, the winners are Republicans Jolyn Arens and Kerry O’Non, with 458 votes and 452 votes respectively, according to the unofficial results from Friday.

Leland Township also voted for two trustees. Wednesday morning’s unofficial results showed that Republican Steve Scales and Democrat Kathryn Dawkins received the two most votes. But as of Friday evening, another Republican, Mariann Kirch, surged past Dawkins for the second most votes, with Kirch receiving 799 votes to Dawkins’s 775 votes.

According to MLive, apart from Calhoun County, which had a software error, officials say the unreported votes in Kent, Kalamazoo, and Leelanau counties stemmed from human error, not machine error.

In Calhoun County, Battle Creek officials used two high-speed absentee ballot tabulators, but the county’s system wasn’t programmed to combine the drives from the two tabulators, officials said.

After reading the first set of numbers, the system replaced the first results with the second set instead of adding them together.

Prior to the roughly 4,600 votes being tallied in Calhoun County, the county’s unofficial results had shown that MI State House incumbent Democrat Rep. Jim Haadsma lost to Republican challenger Steve Frisbie by a tally of 19,233 votes to 17,852 votes.

The Associated Press called the race for Steve Frisbie, the Republican challenger for the Michigan House, on Thursday afternoon.

But according to Tim O’Non, who we spoke with last night, the Leelanau County clerk, who has been in office for decades, told him that the missing votes were also due to a “software glitch.” 

In the race for Michigan State University’s Board of Trustees, one of the apparent winners changed in the unofficial results due to a data error in Allegan County, the Lansing State Journal reported. The unreported votes in Calhoun County contributed to the flip.