Why Wayne County is taking so long to count the vote

DETROIT (FOX 2) - Coming into election night, Wayne County and Detroit election officials were optimistic that this presidential election counting would go faster than previous years. But as of midnight, just 10% of the vote in Wayne County had been tabulated.

Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told FOX 2 she had the ambitious goal of completing Michigan's largest count by midnight on Election Day. But the Wayne County Election Results page has less than 10% of the vote in by that deadline.

Thanks to new laws that allow absentee ballots to be pre-processed before election day, as well as allowing early voting, Winfrey believed they'd be ready to count all the votes quickly.

It would have been a seismic shift from the days of delayed results in 2020, the last presidential election that placed Wayne County at the center of the political world as voters waited to learn who would be the country's next leader. But it didn't happen.

What's taking Wayne County so long to count?

For one, an election worker transporting ballots from a Detroit polling location crashed and sealed boxes spilled all over the road.

The woman is expected to be okay and the ballots remained in their sealed canisters and are not being handled by Detroit Police.

Authorities say ballot workers are arriving to pick them up and take them to Huntington Place to be counted.

The other problem is absentee ballots. Just before midnight, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said they expected one more shipment of absentee ballots which had not arrived yet.