Elections

A welcome change for the Detroit vote count: 'No chaos'

By Don Gonyea,

Lexie Schapitl

Published November 5, 2024 at 10:38 PM EST

In 2020, as Detroit officials were tallying the vote, a crowd of Republican observers grew increasingly angry as false rumors of voter fraud spread across social media. At one point they were shouting, "Stop the count!"

This year: “It’s diametrically different from the experience that we had in 2020,” says Daniel Baxter, the Detroit Elections Department's chief operating officer.

“There’s no chaos going on right now, no pandemonium,” Baxter says. “Nobody is banging on windows, nobody is shouting, 'Stop the count!' Do you hear that? I think I hear people singing 'kumbaya.' It’s very peaceful here today.”

After the 2020 chaos, the city enacted a number of changes for the vote-counting process, including using a smaller, more secure location. Read more about the changes here.

Elections

Don Gonyea

You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.

Lexie Schapitl

Lexie Schapitl is an associate producer with NPR's Washington Desk, where she does a little bit of everything. She can be found reporting from Capitol Hill, producing the NPR Politics podcast or running the NPR Politics social media channels. She has also produced coverage of the January 6th Committee hearings, Trump's first impeachment and the 2020 and 2022 campaigns.