LANSING — The Michigan Bureau of Elections released a report this week on the 2024 election, which includes hand-counted audits from hundreds of randomly selected precincts around the state.
Several of Michigan’s election laws require officials to conduct pre- and post-election checks to ensure voting machines are tabulating ballots correctly.
The Secretary of State’s office said that out of nearly 120,000 randomly sampled ballots, the audit found a difference of 33 votes, or about .03%.
“The goal of the audit is just to do a final double check of everything that happened on Election Day and prior to the election, just to make sure that it was run correctly,” said Grand Traverse County Clerk Bonnie Scheele.
Scheele says that the results show the state’s systems working as intended.
“These machines — they count them right,” Scheele said. “Every time we hand-counted, they came out right, and they did this last time too. So I have confidence in our equipment and definitely in my township and city clerks and the way they run the elections.”
The audits were conducted through a mix of hand-counting and cross-referencing digital and physical voter data.
The only official recount conducted was in the 44th House District, a Battle Creek seat that the victor won by 79 votes. The recount dropped that margin to 61.