Meridian Township voters leave recreational marijuana businesses in limbo, recount requested

LANSING, Mich. (WILX) - There will be a recount in the ballot proposal vote that opened the door for recreational marijuana businesses in Meridian Township. The proposal to ban them failed by 14 points.

Background: Recreational marijuana on ballot for Meridian Township

“It’s a pretty divided community, obviously, on the issue. Any time you have 12,500 people vote on an issue and the difference is 14, you have a very divided community,” said Meridian Township Manage, Frank Walsh.

He said he doesn’t expect the vote totals to change. All votes were counted electronically – which makes error unlikely.

“We’re pretty confident that the vote tally will remain the same,” Walsh said. “But if citizen’s group wants to have a recount, unfortunately the township’s left paying for that.”

Walsh said the township will pay for the recount using funds they’ve set aside for unexpected expenses.

Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum said “there’s a lot that goes into recounting votes” from the primary election. She estimates the cost to be around $13,000 and said the recount s expected to take 48 hours.

“So we’ll have 44 new employees – 22 teams and they will hand count every single ballot to do the recount,” Byrum said.

“The most important thing in all of this is that all the votes are counted and we get the exact results, and we’ll get that from County Clerk Barb Byrum,” said Walsh.

Byrum said the employees will be hired temporarily and there will be one Democrat and one Republican to balance each team.

The recount can’t start until after the election results are certified.

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