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Update, 9:55 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from Hamtramck Mayor Adam Alharbi.
A tiny Michigan city must count 37 additional ballots more than nine months after the election in question, potentially flipping an election eight months after the announced winner took office.
The Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the city of Hamtramck, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and current Hamtramck Mayor Adam Alharbi, leaving in place a March decision from the Michigan Court of Appeals that ordered the ballots counted. The parties could appeal to federal courts, but such a challenge would face significant expenses, not to mention legal hurdles.
These 37 ballots weren’t counted on Election Day after mistakenly being left in their opened envelopes and returned to the clerk’s office. They were later discovered there, but only after outside officials had entered the office — allegedly to address punching bags bearing candidates’ faces that had been left inside — thus breaking the ballots’ chain of custody.
The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked over whether to include the ballots in the final count because of concerns about the chain of custody, leaving the votes uncounted.
Those 37 ballots could now decide the mayoral race months after Alharbi — who beat his opponent Muhith Mahmood by only 11 votes — took office.
The identities of the 37 voters have not been made public.
“This is a great victory for democracy and for the rights of voters to have their votes counted,” Mark Brewer, Mahmood’s attorney, said in an email Friday afternoon.
He emphasized that counting the ballots will change the final vote totals, but it won’t be clear who the final winner is until after all 37 ballots are counted.
It is not clear when the Wayne County Board of Canvassers may consider the ballots in question. Questions sent to several canvassers weren’t immediately returned Friday.
While such a decision is atypical, there are plenty of examples of election results remaining unresolved for months, Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, told Votebeat.
In 2008, for example, the Minnesota Senate race was decided by only a few hundred votes, and Sen. Al Franken wasn’t sworn in until the July following his election after a series of legal challenges.
“It takes time to get it right, and sometimes that means months,” Levitt said. “It’s very unusual, but it’s not unheard of, and frankly, I think the citizens benefit by making sure that these things are closely examined by the courts.”
It’s just the latest in a tumultuous saga in Hamtramck, a city of less than 28,000 people that has been racked by a number of election-related scandals. Last week, Mohammed Hassan, a city councilman who is also the city’s mayor pro tem, was sentenced to a year of probation after he was found guilty of forging someone’s signature on an absentee ballot. Another council member, Muhtasin Sadman, pleaded guilty to election fraud charges earlier this year.
Alharbi said in an email Friday that he wasn’t worried about his seat but rather “the future of our city,” pointing to at least one additional ballot that turned up later.
“The integrity of the process is fundamentally compromised,” he wrote.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel requested an independent prosecutor investigate a number of members of the council last year, alleging that six people “conspired to receive unvoted absentee ballots that had been signed by recently naturalized citizens, and to then fill in the candidates of their choosing” in the city’s 2023 election. No other charges related to that request have been made public.
Rana Faraj, the city’s clerk during last year’s election, was replaced by city officials in part for the envelope mixup, officials said. She sued the city late last year, alleging officials retaliated against her for trying to whistleblow “ongoing election integrity issues.” Court records show a review hearing is scheduled in that case for October.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.
