Voting Shenanigans in Michigan

By Eric Dawe

In the 2022 mid-term elections in Michigan, voters handed control of the Michigan Legislature to the Democrats, giving them a majority in both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan Senate — something that hasn’t happened for forty years. Since then, they’ve been working hand in glove with our notorious Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer, including passing a slew of bills that significantly transform election procedures in the State of Michigan and make it easier to commit election fraud, while at the same time making it harder to uncover it.

A little background on Governor Whitmer for the uninitiated is in order. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Whitmer transferred Covid-stricken seniors to nursing homes and long-term care facilities and prevented the removal of Covid-infected patients from these facilities, thus exposing the most vulnerable segment of the population — those over age 60 and with pre-existing medical conditions — to the dangers of this disease.

Thousands of seniors in these long-term housing and care facilities died, but clever manipulation of the statistics hid the magnitude of the deaths in these facilities — until the Auditor General’s Report released in January of 2022. It documented that Whitmer’s administration underreported nursing home covid deaths by a whopping 42%.

Whitmer imposed Covid-19 restrictions on the state’s population that she regularly disregarded. During the Covid lockdown, Whitmer took a $40,000 flight on a private jet to Florida. She told the media it was to visit her ‘sick father,’ but there were no medical records to verify this. The duration of her trip was first reported as two days. Whitmer later admitted that her staff lied to the press; she was gone for four days.  No one knows to this day who paid for the $40K flight or what she was doing in the Sunshine State.

Back to the story at hand. In November of 2022, Michigan voters also passed Proposal 2, a proposal to amend the voting procedures previously authorized in the State of Michigan’s Constitution. While the proposal passed with (ostensibly) 60% of the vote, the recent batch of bills purportedly written to implement the changes of Proposal 2 goes significantly beyond what was authorized by the voters.

The new legislation hands over verification of absentee ballots from an elected bipartisan board of inspectors to city or township clerks. They also significantly expand the powers of election clerks and the Secretary of State. For example, the Secretary of State can now dictate election procedures without going through the formal rule-making process. This greatly increases the potential for fraud and significantly reduces the safeguards against it.

Senate Bill 367 allows clerks in municipalities with at least 5,000 people to process and count absentee ballots eight days before Election Day. The eight-day, pre-election day window will make it very difficult for poll watchers to observe the handling and counting of mail-in votes. (What could possibly go wrong there?) Municipalities will work closely with the SoS, to whom the bill assigns the task of unilaterally “supervising the implementation and conduct of early voting for state and federal elections.” (God forbid that the SoS has entrenched political biases.)

According to Representative Ruth Johnson (R) Holly, MI, these bills remove every instance of the word ‘fraud’ in the previous law and replace them with the word, ‘error.’ Criminality of intent is thus effectively insulated from prosecution and the ability to address election fraud is stripped away. In fact, under Senate Bills 603 and 604, alleged fraud can no longer be used to request a recount.

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