OTTAWA COUNTY, Mich. — Over the course of about nine hours Thursday, nearly a dozen precincts in Ottawa County participated in a recount of ballots from the August primary election.
The recount stemmed from a request from 9th District County Commissioner Roger Belknap after losing to his challenger Phil Kuyers in the primary earlier this month.
Initial results from the election show Kuyers winning by a commanding 16 points with 4,070 votes cast for Kuyers and 2,997 cast for Belknap.
The results of the recount showed a similar story with Kuyers actually netting an additional five votes in the process.
Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck said he was happy with the great work that the local clerks and election workers both during the recount and during the election.
"We had incredible team of 22 individuals who were essentially our recount team at work all day long, verifying, not only hand counting the ballots, but also verifying that the seals on those ballot containers that were placed on the containers by the bipartisan teams that sealed them up on election night, that those were correct," said Roebuck. "Every single one of our ballot containers was correctly and properly sealed, and the seal numbers properly documented, and the bat and the number of ballots in every container match the number of voters."
The entire recount lasted almost nine hours and cost Belknap about $5,000, Roebuck told 13 ON YOUR SIDE.
The recount results ended up being nearly identical to the unofficial results, with only a tiny margin of error from election night.
"So there's a little over 7,000 total votes cast between the two candidates, and those five votes represent literally less than 1/10 of 1% change, right the accuracy level there was within 1/10 of 1% and that's really incredible as well. And you know, recounts, ballots can change for a couple of different reasons," said Roebuck.
More than 100 people were at the recount between volunteers, poll workers, clerks, bipartisan observers, observers from each campaign, media and the general public.
Roebuck said that observers from both candidates could be seen agreeing on how ballots should be read, including a specific absentee ballot that had to be recreated after being damaged.
"There was a situation where a voter had voted an absentee ballot. The ballot was, I believe, was torn and was unable on election day to go through the tabulator correctly. And so the law requires for a bipartisan team on election day to duplicate the votes of that ballot onto a new ballot that can actually be cast in the tabulator. And the team that was duplicating the ballot left off this particular race. And so that was actually one of the net votes for former commissioner Phil Kuyers was essentially the duplication team on election day did not properly duplicate that ballot. And what I thought was interesting there was the candidates have observers from both sides, both candidates had observers at the table, and everyone at that table agreed the observers were not going to challenge that vote," said Roebuck.
"I think it was some really cool moments throughout the day of both sides recognizing the importance of the process, the accuracy of the process, and really coming together to support our democratic process," Roebuck added.
According to the recount filing, Belknap's request on Aug. 19 was based in two factors.
One was what Belknap, according to the filing, described as "complications and outages of online reporting." The county clerk has now outlined the technical difficulties that caused the results site to become unavailable for a brief period on election night.
"When our website, our election results website, went down, we literally, within the span of one hour, had 30,000 unique visitors to the site, and over 129,000 refreshes to the site," Roebuck said. "And so, that was just a significant impact to the server at the county here."
This, Roebuck stressed, did not impact the vote totals.
According to the filing, the second factor Belknap outlined was what he attested were screenshots of results reported in local media.
13 ON YOUR SIDE acknowledged that results in the race were initially inverted on its website, inaccurately reporting the numbers and giving the impression that unofficial results portrayed Belknap to be the victor, when this was not the case.
"We know that voters come to us for minute-by-minute election results, and we strive for 100% accuracy," 13 ON YOUR SIDE News Director Brooks Blanton said in a statement. "Due to human error, on the morning of August 7, candidate vote totals were transposed on the WZZM website. As soon as the mistake was realized, correct vote totals were updated."
