Another MC4EI piece featured on 100% Fed Up!
Published August 14, 2026

Michigan Citizens for Election Integrity is a grassroots, patriotic group troubled by election dishonesty, fraud and illegality — no matter whether it comes from the blues or the reds in politics.

Such conduct must be named and exposed. Below is a look at several instances of bipartisan misconduct and illegal behavior.

Michigan: Democrat
Democrat Kwame Kilpatrick, dubbed the “hip-hop” mayor, became the youngest person ever elected to that office in Detroit’s 2001 mayoral race at age 31. He sought re-election in 2005 against Democrat Freeman Hendrix, who had the backing of Detroit’s major news outlets. Kilpatrick had already been tangled in scandals, including dipping into city funds. Hendrix was favored to win until “surprise” results late on election night allegedly swung the race to Kilpatrick. (Late-night absentee ballot dumps sound familiar?) In fact, Hendrix had beaten Kilpatrick comfortably in the primary — yet lost the general election.
Detroit was poorly served by Kilpatrick as mayor afterward, with further corruption including racketeering, mail fraud and bribery — 24 felonies in all! He was sentenced to 28 years in prison, but President Trump commuted the sentence (on Trump’s final night in the White House) after Kilpatrick had served only 7 years.

Michigan: Republican
Paul Manni, a Republican City Council candidate in Sterling Heights, Michigan, was recently accused of forging signatures on several absentee ballot applications in the November 2021 election.

Michigan: Democrat
Southfield Clerk Sherikia Hawkins, a Democrat, faces six felony charges tied to forging or falsifying election records in the November 2018 election. Specifically, she was accused of discarding absentee ballots after they reached the clerk’s office and were logged into the computer system. She claimed the ballot envelopes lacked proper voter signatures, but the actual aim was to conceal discrepancies between the number of absentee ballots cast and the number counted.

Michigan: Democrat
Kathy Funk ran as a Democrat for township clerk in Flint, Michigan in the 2020 election. She was accused of deliberately breaking a seal on a ballot container so the votes could not be totaled during an expected recount. She won re-election by a narrow margin in the unofficial count. She was charged with ballot tampering and misconduct in office.

Pennsylvania: Democrat
In 2021, Democrat Marie Beren, a senior election official in Philadelphia, was charged with multiple counts of voter fraud and conspiracy. Beren served as a “judge of elections,” essentially the head of a polling place. She carried out multiple illegal acts, such as casting votes in other people’s names, urging in-person voters to back a particular candidate, and encouraging voters to cast extra votes for absent family members. She and other workers also added names to poll books of people who never entered the polling place, to falsely match the number of fake votes cast. She and other workers did this from 2015 to 2019. Prosecutors noted that fraud occurred “at every level of government, from municipal to state to federal.”

North Carolina: Republican
North Carolina was no stranger to election tampering. L. McCrae Dowless Jr. was convicted of voter fraud in 2016 and 2018, sentenced to prison and fined. In the 2018 primary, he and his operatives gathered ballots from voters and stored them at his home. They filled in votes on parts or all of some ballots to favor certain Republican candidates, specifically Republican Mark Harris, who was running for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district. They also forged some witness signatures, following Dowless’s instructions on avoiding detection. That included controlling the ink color used for witness signatures, signing a different person’s name as witness so the same person wouldn’t witness too many ballots, and delivering no more than nine ballots per post office visit. They also made sure to use post offices near where the voters lived. Mark Harris won the initial election, but when the ballot fraud surfaced a new election was called. Harris did not run again. He was not charged with election fraud.

Virginia: Democrat
In Virginia, Fairfax County Democrat election officials issued ballots to voters who had not met the state’s legal requirement to include the last four digits of their Social Security numbers on mail-in or absentee ballot applications. This was a clear violation of election law. The state court declined to restrain the Fairfax County officials, concluding that the nonprofit Virginia Institute for Public Policy lacked “standing,” or the right to sue, over the violation. Republican Glenn Youngkin won the 2021 governor’s race, so the issue may seem moot. But it shouldn’t be. Illegalities should be exposed and called out whether the consequences turn out small or large.

New Jersey: Democrat
In 2020, four Democrats were charged and arrested over a mail-in ballot election fraud scheme in New Jersey. Two were Paterson City Council members. Charges included unauthorized possession of ballots, tampering with and falsifying public records, and false registrations.

Florida: Republican
In Florida, Republican canvassers switched the party registration of more than 100 voters without their consent in 2021. The voters came from low-income housing projects across Miami.

Connecticut: Democrat
In 2017, Michael DeFilippo, a Democrat and landlord, stole voter registrations and absentee ballots from college students in his building and forged their signatures so he could vote for himself for a city council seat. He was indicted for election fraud and faces up to 85 years in prison.

Maryland: Republican
In Maryland in 2011, Paul Schurick was campaign manager for Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert L. Ehrlich, who ultimately lost the general election. But Schurick was convicted of authorizing robocalls
on Election Day that used false information to discourage 112,000 registered Democrats in largely black Baltimore and in Prince George County from voting in 2010.

Missouri: Democrat
In 2016, Penny Hubbard ran as a Democrat in a primary race in Missouri’s 78th House District. She won by just 90 votes. Her opponent, Bruce Franks Jr., contested the result. An investigation found that Hubbard won thanks to a lopsided absentee vote count that heavily favored her. A judge ruled that enough illegitimate absentee votes had been cast to affect the outcome. A new election was held, and Franks easily defeated Hubbard by a margin of 1,500 votes.

In his book “Dirty Little Secrets,” political analyst Larry Sabato observed that Republican election fraud is less common than Democrat fraud. Why? Republican voters tend to be middle class and are not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic.” Paul Herrison, director of the Center for American Politics at the University of Maryland, added that “most incidents of wide-scale voter fraud reportedly occur in inner cities, which are largely populated by minority groups.”

Election experts Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund, in their book “Who’s Counting?”, wrote that “Democrats are far more skilled at encouraging poor people — who need money — to participate in vote-buying schemes.” “I had no choice. I was hungry that day,” Thomas Felder told the Miami Herald, explaining why he illegally voted in a mayoral election. “You wanted the money; you were told who to vote for.” And sometimes it isn’t just food that vote stealers are hungry for.

A former Democratic congressman told one of these authors, “When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.”

Abraham Lincoln wisely observed: “Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”

The time has come to put an end to election fraud, no matter who commits it or where it happens. But make no mistake: most election fraud is committed by Democrats.

To conclude otherwise would truly be a “fraud-ian slip” — especially after the election to end all elections when it comes to fraud: the November 2020 election!