By C.J. Carnacchio
Leader Editor
All the votes have been recounted and while the numbers changed a bit on both sides, the outcome did not.
John Reilly, of Oakland Township, is still the winner and Joe Kent, of Addison Township, is still the loser in the Republican primary race for the 46th District seat in the state House of Representatives.
“After every vote was counted, Republican voters chose John Reilly to be their nominee,” said Kent in a written statement released following the recount.
“While I am disappointed, I would like to congratulate Mr. Reilly on his victory. I remain deeply committed to advancing conservative principles, and will stay active fighting for those values.”
The recount was conducted on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1. Kent lost the race to Reilly by 15 votes, according to the recount calculation sheet released by the Oakland County Elections Division.
Prior to the recount, the official election results showed Kent losing by just 29 votes, so he requested a recount.
The recount, which encompassed 37 voter precincts spanning four townships, showed Reilly garnered 6,474 votes, while Kent received 6,459 votes.
Originally, the tallies were 6,460 votes for Reilly and 6,431 for Kent.
During the recount, Kent gained a total of 28 votes – 17 in Orion Township, four in Oxford Township, four in Brandon Township and three in Oakland.
But Reilly gained, too. He picked up a total of 14 votes – 12 in Orion, two in Oakland and one in Oxford. He also lost one vote in Orion.
Addison Township was the only place where the election results and the recount tallies were exactly the same for all voter precincts.
The most vote changes occurred in Orion, but to be fair, the township has 15 precincts, more than any other community in the 46th District. Oakland has eight precincts, Oxford has seven, Brandon six and Addison three.
Joe Rozell, director of elections for Oakland County, explained what the issues were in Orion.
He cited “two main reasons,” both of which concerned absentee voter (AV) ballots.
Of the 17 votes, Kent gained in Orion, 15 came from absentee voters. Of the 12 votes Reilly gained in Orion, nine came from AV ballots and the vote he lost was also due to an AV ballot.
There were some AV ballots where the voters clearly marked the Republican section in the 46th District race, but they also accidentally made a “stray mark” in an oval on the Democratic side, Rozell explained.
The optical scanning machine picks up this mark, kicks out the ballot and issues an alert because in a primary election, voters can’t split their tickets. They must vote for all Republican or all Democratic candidates.
At this point, what should happen, according to Rozell, is the election workers create duplicates of those ballots without the stray marks, so they can be fed into the machine and the votes counted.
These ballots were fed back into the machine and the override button was hit, the end result being that partisan section did not get counted, he explained.
“Those all ended up getting resolved at the recount rather than being resolved on election day,” Rozell said.
During a recount, each and every ballot is thoroughly examined and counted by hand.
“I think that when something is done by hand, it’s scrutinized more,” said Orion Township Clerk Penny Shults. “If there (is) a stray mark in the target area, that ballot should, indeed, be duplicated. We follow all the guidelines that the state has set forth for (the) duplication of ballots, (but) occasionally, some of them are missed.”
Sometimes it’s easy for a person to overlook if it’s “just a small mark.”
“It could be (the) resting of a pen in the target area that causes a crossover vote,” she said.
The other issue concerning AV ballots had to do with voters using pencils to fill in the ovals, instead of black or blue ink as indicated in the instructions.
Rozell said sometimes the pencil shading is dark enough for the machine to read and sometimes it’s not. When it’s not, those votes do not get tabulated by the machine.
“When we counted them by hand, (the ovals) were filled in, so (Kent and Reilly) picked up votes from that as well,” he said.
Overall, Rozell was quite pleased with how things went during the examination of nearly 13,000 ballots.
“The recount did go well. Things went very smoothly,” he said. “We were able to finish the tabulating in about a day-and-a-half.
“All of the observers from both sides got along very well. The candidates got along very well. It was a very harmonious process.”
“The integrity of our elections are at the foundation of our democracy,” said Kent in his statement.
“I would like to thank the election workers that conducted the recount and for the thousands of voters that cast their ballot for me,” he said.

This is the first recount Shults has taken part in since being elected clerk in 2008. She viewed it as an educational experience.
“Having now gone through a recount and seeing how it works from beginning to end, it’s very interesting and I want to share what I learned with our election inspectors,” she said. “You do learn from every experience . . . It was a great experience, I think, for everybody.”
Shults believes both the recount and the narrow margin of this race should serve as a reminder of why citizens need to make their voices heard at the ballot box.
“Every single vote counts,” she said. “People need to get out there and vote. I think that’s so important.”
“Our votes matter and we need to have full participation in every election,” Shults added.