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Posted: 1/1/0001
Marquette, Michigan - In the marble halls of one of Michigan's most famous courthouses, an Independent candidate for Marquette County prosecutor filed a recount petition in her race against a longtime democratic incumbent.
Former assistant prosecutor Cathy Church cited uncounted absentee ballots and suspected problems with Diebold optical scanners used to tabulate ballots as the reason for the recount. She lost to the incumbent by 1,784 votes or about six percent.
'We decided there were some anomalies we wanted to look at,' Church said. ''You took your ballot and put it into a machine that may or may not have sucked your ballot in on the first attempt.'
Church served for 14 years as an assistant prosecutor of domestic violence cases.
She said the $400 filing fee was worth 'the peace of mind.'
The Nov. 12, 2008 press conference scheduled for the front steps of the historic courthouse was moved inside the main doors due to a cold rain.
The Marquette County Courthouse was the site of the director Otto Preminger's famous 1959 movie trial 'Anatomy of a Murder' based on a book penned by prosecuter and future Michigan Supreme Court Judge John D. Voelker, under the name 'Robert Traver,' and starring Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, and a score by Duke Ellington.
At the same courthouse in 1913, former President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded six cents after winning a libel suit against a local newspaper publisher who wrote that Roosevelt was addicted to alcohol.
Church said the optical scanners used to tabulate the vote are sometimes being unreliable.
Diebold optical scanning machines don't always read people's marks on the ballots correctly,' she said.
'The scanning machines (in Marquette County) have had problems around the county,' Church said. 'Any mark within the circle counts as a valid vote in Michigan.'
'However, the scanners are like anything, what they are doing is t