“Recount mess: What if Michigan had held the key to election?”

Detroit Free Press:I

Imagine for a moment: What if Michigan’s 2016 presidential election had been a repeat of Florida’s in 2000?

Imagine that Donald Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton had been just 200 votes instead of 10,000  and that the whole country was waiting on one last state to pick its winner.

Instead of examining hanging chads in Palm Beach County, the eyes of the world would instead be riveted on Wayne County, where one ballot box was sealed with duct tape and hundreds of precincts couldn’t be recounted because of other errors.

A recount in Michigan in 2016 almost certainly wouldn’t have mattered. But what if it would have?

“If this had been a scenario where Michigan would have been the deciding factor in a presidential election, we would have been embarrassed as a state,” said Jocelyn Benson, a law professor at Wayne State University who founded the nonpartisan Michigan Center for Election Law. “It would have brought national attention to the inadequacies of an election system that is in desperate need of reform.”

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