“There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”
Thus saith the three Republicans and one Democrat from the Michigan Senate oversight committee charged with investigating allegations of fraud in 2020. Their report issued Wednesday recommended that the attorney general “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.” It would be “a complete waste of time” to consider their allegations further since those making them have “zero credibility.”
The northern Michigan Republican stronghold of Antrim County initially reported that Democrat Joe Biden won the county, but canvassing led to the correction of the results and showed Trump overwhelmingly won there.
The report also delved into controversial claims made after the election, including that hundreds of dead people voted and almost 290,000 illegal votes were cast by absentee ballot.
While the investigation found that there are “glaring issues that must be addressed” in state election law, it added there is “no evidence presented at this time” to prove “significant acts of fraud” occurred to subvert the will of voters. The committee recommended giving county clerks the ability to remove deceased voters from the Qualified Voter File, opposed the mass mailing of absentee voter applications and urged the Michigan Bureau of Elections to investigate possible partisan poll worker recruitment in Detroit and Wayne County.
Clerical errors were made
The supposed fraud allegations are typical.
A clerical error assigned the vote of a dead man to his son with the same name living at the same address.
The Voter Integrity Project alleged hundreds of thousands of absentee voter ballots were mailed to Michigan voters without previously being requested. That never happened. VIP called 1,500 persons “and asked if they had received a ballot without requesting it.” VIP then extrapolated from positive responses to there being hundreds of thousands of “illegal ballots.” The investigation found that many on the list “equated receiving an absentee ballot application with receiving an absentee ballot” and did not know the difference. Voting a ballot after requesting one via an unsolicted application “is not an illegal action by a lawful voter and it is not indicative of fraudulent or illicit behavior of the voter nor of an illegitimate vote.”
And the alleged middle-of-the-night “ballot dump”? No evidence for that either, the committee concluded (whatever claims witnesses made in Rudy Giuliani’s binder of affidavits). “Those drawing such conclusions in their affidavits and testimony were asked to provide proof that something illegal actually occurred but no proof that ballots were fraudulent was provided or found by the Committee in testimony or in subpoenaed records.”
Not that the committee found no issues. Just not so much with actual voters. Initial vote-counting errors in Antrim county resulted from “human errors by election officials, including the failure to update equipment after changing the ballot design,” reports Detroit News. Those errors sparked a cascade of conspiracy theories.
Eric Boehlert at PressRun:
The withering Michigan rebuke is reminiscent of Arizona Republican election officials who have strenuously denounced the charade “audit” that Trump conspiracists have been conducting for months there with no end in sight. (Most recently, they transported Arizona voting system data to a secret hideout in Montana.)
“This is insane just from a competence standpoint,” Arizona Republican Stephen Richer recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I mean, there is no good reason for doing this.” Added former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R): “I think they should maybe just call it quits. I don’t think that it’s going to serve any purpose. It’s not going to change the election.”
The sweeping Michigan conclusions this week come as Trump loyalists there push for an Arizona-style ballot review.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
The thorough debunking by the Republican-led senate panel would not stop the Republican-led Michigan state legislature from moving swiftly to make voting harder anyway, including passing on Wednesday bills tightening voter ID rules (Detroit Free Press):
Michigan already requires voters to present an ID at their polling locations. But under current law, voters who don’t have an ID when they show up can sign an affidavit affirming their identity and vote normally. SB 303, which passed the House along a party-line vote, would eliminate that option.
Instead, voters who don’t present an ID on Election Day would have to cast a provisional ballot. SB 304, which also passed the House along party lines, would allow those provisional ballots to be counted only if a voter goes to his or her local clerk’s office and presents an ID within six days of the election. Earlier versions of the bills were passed in the Senate June 16. The two bills have been returned to the Senate.
Because for voter fraud conspiracists and their lawmaking enablers, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Voter confidence they have worked assiduously to undermine must be restored. Someone must be punished. Those someones are voters Republicans believe are likely to vote for Democrats.
The only organized, wide-scale effort to subvert the will of voters is happening in plain view in GOP-controlled legislatures across the country.