EXPOSED: Detroit Election Night Reporting Process

By Patrick Colbeck

When I served as a certified Poll Challenger at the Detroit Absentee Vote Counting Board (AVCB) located at the TCF Center during the 2020 general election, I had one singular mission – monitor the tallying of the votes. Of course, in order to effectively execute that mission, I needed to know how votes were supposed to be tallied in the City of Detroit. As it turns out, this process was not only a mystery to me, it was also a mystery to the election officials tasked with overseeing the election.

“one of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count”

Votescam (1992) by Jim and Ken Collier

Background

During the 2020 election, the City of Detroit had 503 election precincts. Each election precinct featured a Dominion ImageCast Precinct (ICP) tabulators and a Dominion ImageCastX (ICX) Voter Assist Terminal Station (VATS) to assist handicapped individuals in generating a ballot for them to deposit into the ICP for tabulation. The Detroit Absentee Voter Counting Board (AVCB) featured 134 counting boards. Each of these counting boards were assigned 3-5 precincts. AVCB ballots were tallied by 25 ImageCast Central (ICC) tabulators which routed rejected ballots to one of 14 unique Adjudicator workstations.

The management of elections in the City of Detroit is a large, complicated operation featuring many different moving parts. The task of monitoring the tally of votes in this environment is made even more challenging by the fact that there was no discernible physical audit trail for vote tallies. All tallying of the votes was performed by Dominion voting systems inaccessible to any election monitors. The tallying of votes should be the most transparent component of our election processes. It is sadly among the least transparent. In Detroit, it is unclear as to whether there are any election officials who truly understand how their votes are tallied on election night.

If anyone should know what the process for tallying the votes in the City of Detroit was, it should have been Chris Thomas.

In addition to being a Senior Advisor to Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey during the 2020 election, he was also a past President of the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED) and served for almost four decades as Michigan’s State Elections Director under multiple administrations. Clearly, he should have know how votes were tallied in Detroit. Sadly, he did not…or at least he said he did not to me personally on multiple occasions throughout the night of November 3, 2020 at the Detroit Absentee Vote Counting Board (AVCB).

As a former Michigan State Senator and former Vice Chair of the Michigan Senate Elections and Government Reform Committee, I had many interactions with Mr. Thomas during my tenure in the Michigan Senate. In fact, at one point I had asked him to review my depiction of election processes in Michigan for accuracy. I still recall the meeting that we held in my office where he stated that he actually learned quite a bit about how our elections were managed from his review of of the election process diagrams that I created. Perhaps that should have been a clue.

He may have been truthful in saying that he had no idea how votes were tallied in Detroit. If that were indeed the case, he was grossly negligent in his duties. Who did know how votes were tallied in Detroit? The answer to that question is what I intend to explore in this post.

Detroit AVCB Pre-Election Walkthru

Before each election, election officials are encouraged to conduct a pre-election walkthru of their election processes for campaign representatives, poll challengers and poll watchers. These sessions provide an opportunity to evaluate compliance with election statutes and written election procedures. The pre-election walkthru for the Detroit AVCB can be viewed in the following video:

The walkthru highlights the issues with tracking the chain of custody for ballots. Ballots scanned by Dominion ImageCast Central tabulators may or may not be transferred to adjudicator workstations. This chain of custody is complicated by the fact that there are 503 precincts, 134 Counting Boards, 25 ImageCast Central tabulators, and 14 adjudicator workstations. Each ballot transfer needs to be accompanied by a mapping that enables poll watchers/challengers to know which precinct a given ballot should be associated with. The process leaves significant room for the insertion of ballots into the final vote tally without traceability to a given precinct. Coincidentally, when Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were issued to the City of Detroit for precinct-level vote tallies, they deferred to Wayne County.

Detroit FOIA Requests

The pre-election walkthru did not provide a clear understanding of exactly how votes would be tallied. In order to obtain a better understanding, I issued the following FOIA request of the City of Detroit.

“Please provide a complete process flow chart of how early voting, election day and mail-in vote tallies are processed across all precincts in the City of Detroit including the following Dominion tabulation devices: ImageCast Precincts, ImageCast X, ImageCast Central, RTR Laptops, and EMS Servers.”

March 29, 2024 FOIA Request

In response to my FOIA request, the City of Detroit provided the following diagram:

It should be noted that there is no mention of adjudicator workstations or the Results and Tally Reporting (RTR) laptop in the process materials provided by the City of Detroit. The presence of at least one Detroit EMS server instance can be reasonably inferred from the information provided.

What else can we discern from this proposed response to Clerk Garrett’s inquiry? I have attempted to summarize the findings in the following diagram:

Wayne County FOIA Request

In light of the fact that the City of Detroit deferred to Wayne County for the provision of precinct-level vote tallies for the City of Detroit, I submitted the following FOIA request to Wayne County:

“Please provide a complete process flow chart of how early voting, election day and mail-in vote tallies are processed across all precincts in the City of Detroit including the following Dominion tabulation devices: ImageCast Precincts, ImageCast X, ImageCast Central, RTR Laptops, and EMS Servers.”

March 29, 2024 FOIA Request

In response to my FOIA request, Wayne County provided the following diagram:

What can we discern from this proposed response to Clerk Garrett’s inquiry? I have attempted to summarize the findings in the following diagram:

It appears that the City of Detroit and Wayne County have very similar perceptions as to how vote tallies are transferred from the City of Detroit to Wayne County. In fact, the only substantive difference is the fact that Wayne County highlighted the use of an FTP server as a buffer between the Wayne County EMS Server and the Detroit EMS Server.

Dominion Emails

The vote tally process takes on a much different profile when examined through the eyes of electronic voting system vendor Dominion Voting Systems. The general public is typically not privy to such insights. Because Dominion is a Non-Government Organization (NGO), they are not subject to FOIA requests by the general public. More and more of our election processes have been delegated to NGO’s leaving the general public blind as to how many of our election processes are actually executed. That means that the only way for the general public to understand how key aspects of our elections are executed is often via criminal investigations or civil lawsuits. Thankfully, the general public was recently provided such information.

On March 18, 2024, Barry County, Michigan Sheriff Dar Leaf, released via Twitter a suite of internal Dominion emails that finally provided critical insights into how our elections were actually run. The emails revealed significant deviations between what Dominion officials told the public was happening and what they were actually doing. One of the threads in these emails pertains to an inquiry to about the City of Detroit election operations made by Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett. She was concerned about essentially the same line of questioning about core election processes that I had asked Chris Thomas on election night.

Dominion’s proposed response to Clerk Garrett follows:

Clearly, Dominion Voting Systems personnel demonstrated a more complete understanding of the vote tally management process than election officials at the City of Detroit or Wayne County. The fact that an NGO knows more about how our elections are executed than the government officials responsible for managing our elections is extremely concerning. These concerns are exacerbated when we note that the City of Detroit is the largest municipality in the State of Michigan and is subsequently responsible for management of the largest block of votes. Any corruption of the election processes in Detroit could easily corrupt the election results for the entire state.

What can we discern from this proposed response to Clerk Garrett’s inquiry? I have attempted to summarize the findings in the following diagram:

One of the most notable deviations from the process flows provided by government election officials and Dominion is that the City of Detroit uses two not one Election Management System (EMS) servers – COBO and Boulevard instances. This is a significant departure from the practices of other municipalities. The “COBO” instance presumably refers to the AVCB EMS Server located at the TCF Center in Detroit. The “Boulevard” instance presumably refers to the Detroit Elections bureau EMS server that tallies results across all of the in-person voting precincts.

Another important revelation from the Dominion internal email that was not evident from Detroit or Wayne County FOIA responses was that votes are tallied by Adjudication and RTR Workstations which are not subject to Public Accuracy Tests.

Unanswered Questions

The importance of the vote tally efforts in the City of Detroit is further highlighted by the presence of Executive Vice President of Engineering Nick Ikonomakis in Detroit on election night. Why would Dominion Voting Systems assign their Executive Vice President of Engineering to Detroit? This seems rather odd.

Why is it that an NGO vendor appears to know more about how votes are tallied than City of Detroit or Wayne County election officials?

Why does Detroit have two distinct EMS servers?

How are the vote tallies from each EMS server combined into a single precinct-level vote tally for the City of Detroit?

Who else has access to ENR data? The Dominion email remarks that the end-to-end system test should include Detroit’s ENR vendor. Who is that vendor and how are results transmitted to that vendor?

Conclusion

The vote tally chain of custody is arguably the most important element of our election system. Sadly, it remains the least transparent due to the increasing use of NGO’s to manage our elections. Much of this opaqueness is due to the use of electronic voting systems to tally our vote. This is why we need to eliminate the use of electronic voting systems and return to a transparent hand count of paper ballots…like many of the other countries in the free world.

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