(CBS DETROIT) — With the The 2024 general election is less than a month awaysome voters still have questions and concerns. CBS News Detroit spoke with a city clerk to answer some of those questions.
City Clerk Chris Swope is responsible for administering elections in Lansing.
“The vote counting machines: how do they work and how do we know they are safe for counting votes?”
Swope says the machines that count votes undergo multiple tests and are double-checked before Election Day.
“We test every single machine, and then we do a public test proving that,” he said.
In the event of a recount, Swope says, “Just about every office I’ve seen recounts in most of the votes that are turned over in a recount are human counting errors in a recount.”
“What about jumps in the counting totals when the results come in?”
“That has to do, especially in larger communities, with the way we process absentee ballots,” Swope said. “We process these centrally, and so for the city of Lansing, we only have two machines where everything is collected, so it’s a large portion once uploaded.”
“I worry that the wrong people are being encouraged to do surveillance… people with a strong suspicion that something is wrong.”
Swope says members of all political parties work as poll workers and city and county clerks, making the election process two-tiered.
“Challenger organizations can send people to the absentee voter counting board, and in each precinct the closing process is open to the public,” Swope said.