by Meshawn Maddock
It will likely take weeks, or even months, to sort through the mess that Democrats have made of Michigan’s elections. In the meantime, only the Michigan Legislature can legitimately determine the winner of the state’s presidential Electors.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, state and local election officials, and private organizations backed by Big Tech money all participated in a pattern of lawless misconduct that marred the election process from start to finish. It will be difficult to ascertain the full ramifications of their wrongdoing, but it’s easy to establish that their actions thoroughly corrupted the process, undermining public confidence and eviscerating the integrity of the reported results.
Benson’s brazen disregard for the law is particularly obscene, not least because she occupies such a prominent position in state government. Without even a hint of statutory authority — and in direct violation of Michigan’s election code — Benson flooded the state with absentee ballots in two important ways.
First, she sent out absentee ballot requests to every household in the state, but didn’t take the time to verify whether the intended recipients were still eligible voters, whether they had moved, or even whether they had died.
This created enormous vulnerabilities, especially in light of Benson’s second major transgression: establishing an online system for absentee ballot requests that allowed people to avoid the state’s legal requirement that voters provide a signature when requesting an absentee ballot.
It’s possible that Benson was simply being overzealous in her desire to maximize absentee voting, which would inevitably boost the prospects of her party’s nominee, Joe Biden. That would represent an illegal abuse of power in and of itself, but the irregularities that occurred during the vote-counting process in Detroit suggest that an even more nefarious scheme was afoot.
Election workers went to great lengths to prevent Republican observers from overseeing the process, torturing the letter of the law to disingenuously claim that they fulfilled their legal obligations because the Republicans were allowed to be inside the arena where votes were being counted, even though the observers were kept at such a great distance as to render their presence meaningless. When the observers objected, they were ejected from the counting room and the windows were boarded up to prevent anyone from seeing what took place inside.
And what took place inside was significant. Ballots that allegedly could not be read by machines, for instance, were “cured” by hand — a process that involves election workers filling out new ballots and discarding the originals. Observers from both parties are supposed to observe and sign off on each ballot, but this requirement was brazenly disregarded. Numerous affidavits also allege that election workers ran ballots through high-speed scanners multiple times.
All of this is meticulously detailed in litigation filed by the Amistad Project of the non-partisan Thomas More Society, which has been conducting intensive, on-the-ground investigations for weeks.
The Amistad filing also introduces another element to the story: improper influence from a Big Tech billionaire.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a private organization founded and run by Democrat activists, received $350 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, which it doled out primarily to Democrat-dominated cities and counties in battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. The grants — which came with “claw back” provisions allowing CTCL to recoup the money if recipients failed to follow strict conditions — literally paid the salaries of election workers and funded the purchase of election machinery.
For all intents and purposes, Zuckerberg was calling the shots in the very counting rooms where so many egregious irregularities took place. The American people, meanwhile, weren’t even allowed to peek in through the window.
The whole saga is completely unacceptable. In order for our democracy to function properly, we need free and fair elections conducted with transparency and in rigorous accordance with the laws put in place to ensure electoral integrity. That’s not what happened in Michigan, and it’s not surprising that the public would respond by viewing the reported results with skepticism and suspicion.
Untangling this mess is an urgent priority, but the sort of thorough investigation needed to accomplish that will take quite some time. The only way for Michigan to assign its presidential Electors in a democratically legitimate way is for the Michigan Legislature to step in and exercise its constitutional authority.
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Meshawn Maddock was a Michigan delegate for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. She is also the Co-founder of Michigan Trump Republicans and the wife of Michigan State Representative Matt Maddock.
