Supporters of former President Donald Trump held a “Trump Won” rally in Livonia, Michigan on Tuesday.
Organizers of the event, affiliated with the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), want the state legislature to commission a forensic audit to verify the reliability of the 2020 presidential-election results in the Great Lake State. Officially, Joe Biden received 2,804,040 votes to Trump’s 2,649,852, a margin of 154,188 votes (or 2.83 percent).
MCC says it is holding a rally every week until Michigan legislators order an audit. The protests began on April 15, 2020 in Lansing, with over 15,000 vehicles visiting the state capitol that day. The organization has noted revelations about irregularities in the vote counts of Arizona and Georgia and has argued a closer examination of the 2020 vote in Michigan would be illuminating.
“Grassroots rallies like this one are symptomatic of the doubts and concerns that many Republicans have as to who won the 2020 election,” Marian Sheridan, grassroots vice-chair for the Michigan Republican Party, said in a statement. She cited a recent Rasmussen poll showing 55 percent of all Americans want election audits to be performed in key states. “If faith in Michigan’s voting system is to be restored, there must be a full and complete forensic audit.”
A report on the election by the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee, chaired by Sen. Ed McBroom, (R-MI-Vulcan) came out in late June, though it disappointed many asking for the kind of precise audit desired by the MCC. Upon the report’s release, McBroom said he discovered “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud.”
The Senate report did, however, identify “glaring issues that must be addressed,” when it comes to Michigan elections. It called for cessation of mass mailing absentee-ballot applications, exhorted the Michigan Bureau of Elections to probe poll-worker recruitment practices in Wayne County for partisan biases and suggested letting county clerks delete deceased voters from eligible-voter files.
Even McBroom’s report went too far for Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-MI-Ann Arbor), who cast a losing committee vote to reject adoption of the document. He said he believed Michigan election law already does enough to prevent irregularities.
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Bradley Vasoli is a reporter at The Michigan Star and The Star News Network. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Trump Supporters” by Anthony Crider. CC BY 2.0.
