County sets recount of supervisor race in Sumpter

On Friday, the Wayne County Clerk’s office accepted a check for $2,250 from Nelson Po for a recount of nine precincts in the Aug. 4 supervisor’s race.
The recount, at a cost of $250 per precinct, will cover precincts 1, 3, and 5 (all at the Sumpter Community Center) and all six absentee ballot counting boards.
Po said the county official called Sumpter Township while he was there on Aug. 21 to alert the township a recount would be held in Sumpter within 10 to 14 days and it would be open to the public to watch.
Po was defeated by incumbent Supervisor John Morgan in the August primary with an announced count of 676 votes for Morgan to 327 for Po. Morgan’s total included 470 absentee votes and Po’s total included 159 absentee votes.
Po’s notarized petition for a recount reads that he is petitioning for a recount. “I have a good-faith belief, but for fraud or mistake committed by the precinct election inspectors in their canvass of returns of the votes cast at the above referenced election, I had a reasonable chance of winning the election. An additional explanation of the fraud or error is provided.”
Ken Sheeks, a poll worker at precinct 5 for the Aug. 4 election, told the Independent the process for the election cannot be tampered with since there are so many safeguards. He said he had been trained and worked at Westland for 15 years as an election inspector and this is his first year working on a Sumpter election. He has lived in Sumpter for 22 years.
He said the training for what Sumpter calls “poll workers” was not as stringent as that in Westland and when he asked about it he said he was told it was because of COVID-19 and that Sumpter doesn’t have as much money to spend on training.
Sheeks said he came to talk to the Independent after seeing the surveillance tape picture in last week’s paper of Sumpter Township Trustee Tim Rush with an election tape in his hand, which bothered him greatly.
He said each poll worker signed each of the four tapes spit out by the election machine to attest that everything was done properly and his name is on all four tapes. He said one tape goes to the township, one to the county, one to the state, and one to the federal government.
He said he is a law-abiding citizen and is afraid that if the election investigation proves there was a problem, he will be one of those to be blamed.
He said that no one could walk off with a tape or all the workers would have to stay until all the tapes were secure. (In last week’s paper a letter writer insinuated that Rush took a tape and left.)
The Independent showed Sheeks the rest of the surveillance tape taken at his precinct that had been obtained by Toni Clark through a Freedom of Information Act request. Clark shared the tape.
Sheeks said he was working around the corner in a room and this was taken in the hallway where he couldn’t see. He said in the surveillance footage there were many things done wrong and the person to be blamed has to be the precinct chairperson Irene Woodell who is responsible for making sure everything is done exactly right.
Sheeks said the poll workers were paid for 17.5 hours that day and he saw the man, he later learned was Tim Rush, coming in and out of the cordoned-off precinct about four times that day. He said Rush had a mask on with the Sumpter seal on one side, so he thought he was a township official of some kind.
Watching the tape, Sheeks said he was surprised that Rush was left alone with the tape in his hands. Also, at one point Rush appears to be writing on the tape and Sheeks said that wouldn’t work because a special kind of ink is used on the tapes and any other ink on the tape would set off alarms when investigating.
Rush was seen taking a picture of the tape with his phone and then rolling the tape up the way it has to be. Sheeks said it is law that you cannot have a camera in the voting area except to take a selfie of yourself at the polls, never of the ballot or anything else.
Sheeks also noted on the surveillance that Woodell’s husband was handling the election tapes and carried an armful of ballots from the machine to the back room although he was not an election official and really shouldn’t even have been in that area. He obviously was helping his wife.