Voting fraud in Detroit — unfolding now — is nothing new. An article in The Federalist recounts the history of voter fraud in the city and the devastating impact this has on the electoral process. It is absolutely essential that both Democratic and Republican election observers be present for the counting of absentee ballots. Whenever a ballot cannot be scanned by the machine, election workers transcribe the intended choices onto a fresh ballot. But without observers from both parties, how can it be assured that this is done accurately? “Michigan state law requires that a Republican and a Democratic official sign off on every voting precinct where absentee ballots are cast in this manner,” reports The Federalist. The precise wording of the law is that representatives from both parties must sign “if possible,” and Democrats are claiming that since they can’t find Republican officials, they are signing the certifications themselves.
Where are the Republicans? They’re in the hallway, being denied sufficient meaningful access to the vote counting process. The windows to the room where the votes were counted were even covered with paper to prevent their seeing anything. Now, following a court order that they be allowed to observe, they’ve been allowed into the room — behind a fence — but all of the ballots and counting equipment have been moved farther away. There have been reports that dates on ballots have been changed, to claim they were received by Election Day, even though they arrived afterwards.
In December 2019, an advocacy group filed suit with Detroit over its voting rolls, which the group claimed were “replete with typos, dead people, duplicate registrations and mistakes about gender and birth: One Detroit voter is listed as being born in 1823—14 years before Michigan was annexed into the Union.” The Detroit News reported on election irregularities in 2016: “Overall, state records show 10.6% of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the retabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals. The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60%. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.”
