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The Michigan legislature is doubling down on President Donald Trump’s allegation that voting fraud led to his defeat in last week’s presidential election.
The House and Senate Oversight Committees on Saturday issued a subpoena for state election records. State legislative committees do have subpoena authority, although it is used infrequently.
Meanwhile, no allegations of actual voter fraud in Michigan have been confirmed. The non-partisan Politi-Fact organization has been sifting through the claims. Among them…
• A list of 14,000 dead people who supposedly voted in Wayne County includes people who never lived in Wayne County. There is no evidence that any votes were cast using the names, except for one woman, who has confirmed that she is, in fact, not actually dead.
• Republican poll challengers were not prevented from observing the election count at the TCF Center in Detroit. Some prospective poll challengers from both sides were barred from entering the room because the number of people inside had exceeded the room’s capacity. At the time, there were more than 200 observers from each party inside.
• A box delivered in a wagon to the TCF Center after the deadline did not contain ballots. It was filled with electronic equipment owned by a television station.
• A video allegedly showing ballot boxes being stuffed in Flint is actually from Russia, and has been online for at least two years.
In addition, the erroneous reporting of some unofficial results from Antrim county turns out to have been the result of an accidental error. A late minor change made to the ballot caused the inaccurate, unofficial report. The ballots themselves were properly counted, and the error would not have affected the official result.
Some windows at the TCF Center were covered during the counting process, after it was discovered that private, personal information could be viewed from outside, and was being photographed. Windows that did not allow outsiders to see personal data were left uncovered.
A clerical error was made in date-stamping and logging some ballots at a satellite voting office in Detroit. Republican and Democratic observers at the site all signed off on the solution.
In the U.S. Senate race, Republican John James has still not conceded. With more than 99 percent of votes counted, James trails Democratic Senator Gary Peters by 1.5 percentage points, or around 85,000 votes.
