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Wayne County officials say the Dearborn City Clerk’s office may have made the city’s recent election — in which George Darany won another four-year term as clerk — impossible to recount, because workers stored absentee ballots in the wrong container, breaking the chain of custody.
Initial election results last week showed Darany trailing his opponent, Sami Elhady, but overwhelming support from absentee voters helped him win by around 2,400 votes.
Those ballots, however, were placed in “retention bags” instead of certified ballot containers. Certified ballot containers typically have multiple seal points and reinforced sides to ensure security, while retention bags are canvas and not as secure. That decision broke the chain of custody, county officials said Thursday during a Wayne County Board of Canvassers meeting.
The improper storage of ballots is potentially a misdemeanor, said Becki Carmargo, corporation counsel for Wayne County.
County officials spotted the problem after Dearborn officials brought the bags to the county for assistance with tabulation. In 21 of the city’s 33 precincts, the number of absentee ballots tallied in the initial count did not match the number of absentee ballots recorded on the voter rolls as having been cast, Greg Mahar, the county’s election director, confirmed to Votebeat.
The county canvassers split 2-2 along party lines over whether to recount the out-of-balance precincts. The board voted to go into recess until Friday, and could reconsider the matter then.
Darany apologized and said his office “mistakenly” chose the wrong bags to store the ballots “in the wee hours of the morning.” The office of city clerk is nonpartisan. Darany previously served in the state Legislature as a Democrat.
“We understand that they’re not certified bags, but the bags were sealed, and they did have the words ‘ballot bags’ on the side, which is how this happened,” Darany told the canvassers during the meeting Thursday, which he attended via Zoom. He did not immediately respond to a phone message from Votebeat requesting comment.
Darany said at the meeting that it was the first time such a thing had happened in his eight years as clerk. Nearly 27,000 ballots were cast in the Nov. 4 election, and of those, just over 7,700 were absentee, according to unofficial results.
Elhady, Darany’s opponent, told Votebeat that it is “alarming that we have a clerk that is not keeping up with the demands of election law.”
He has not decided whether to challenge the election results, he said, but he was disappointed in how it all played out.
Lisa Capatina, chair of the Wayne County canvassers, said she appreciated Darany taking responsibility for the problem. Democrats Edward Keelean and Richard Preuss voted to redo the count, while Republicans Capatina and Toni Sellars voted against it.
“It’s clear to me that there was a loss of the chain of custody,” Sellars said, before voting against retabulation.
Absentee ballots have been a persistent problem for the city in this election. The city had to reprint 10,000 ballots because an extra candidate was left in the City Council portion of the ballot. The reprinting cost more than $3,000, a cost likely to be shouldered by the city.
Ballots are reviewed by several people in the clerk’s office before being printed. Darany also took the blame for that.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.
