MI SOS Illegally Weakened Signature Verification [Video]
Published by Patty McMurray in 100% Fed Up on April 23, 2022 and in Gateway Pundit
Yesterday, Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit and Patty McMurray of 100 Percent Fed Up interviewed True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, the geniuses behind Dinesh D’Souza’s soon-to-be-released “2000 Mules” movie.
Using commercially available geo-tracking cell phone data, True the Vote was able to take footage from drop boxes across America in key states like Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and track over 2,000 mules (illegal ballot harvesters) wearing gloves and many times, disguises to stuff ballot boxes.
During the discussion, we played a clip from an absentee ballot drop box located at the Farwell Recreation Center in Detroit. Liz Harrington retweeted a portion of our interview showing a woman who was captured on camera attempting to deliver several ballots to the absentee ballot dropbox. Before placing the ballots in the dropbox, she appears to notice the envelopes are not signed. She turns away from the dropbox and returns to the vehicle, where she begins to fish for a pen. Once she finds a pen, she appears to be signing each individual ballot and placing them on the vehicle’s dashboard. Once her task of signing other people’s ballots is complete, she inspects them one last time, then gets out of the car, walks to the dropbox, and deposits them.
Watch:
In Michigan, the law allows an individual to deposit absentee ballots for immediate family members in a dropbox. MI law does not, however, give individuals the right to forge the names of voters on absentee ballots. Thanks to Michigan’s crooked, Soros-funded, Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, signing someone else’s ballot didn’t matter in the 2020 election because she actually instructed clerks across Michigan to IGNORE the signatures on the envelope of absentee ballots.
The video clips of suspicious activity outside of satellite voting locations in Detroit obtained by the Gateway Pundit and reviewed by the MC4EI team can be seen here:
Michigan’s dirty, Soros-funded, Democrat Secretary of State made it possible for ballot harvesters to sign other people’s names…
On March 16, 2021, Michigan Judge Christopher Murray ruled that Benson violated the Administrative Procedures Act when she gave MI clerks the order to ignore signatures on absentee ballots in the 2020 election (in other words, she cheated!)
A 2019 lawsuit filed in Michigan by Marc Elias of the infamous Democrat’s law firm Perkins Coie on behalf of the progressive group Priorities USA insisted that signature verification was somehow illegal because it disenfranchises voters.
According to a new ruling in a separate case in Michigan, Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson likely agreed with that sentiment.
State Court of Claims Judge Christopher Murray has ruled invalid Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s guidance issued to Michigan clerks in early October that instructed them to presume the accuracy of absentee ballot signatures.
Because Benson did not go through the proper rule-making process when issuing the guidance, clerks do not need to comply with it for future elections, Murray ruled last week.
“The presumption is found nowhere in state law,” wrote Judge Murray. “The mandatory presumption goes beyond the realm of mere advice and direction, and instead is a substantive directive that adds to the pertinent signature-matching standards.”
“The Michigan Republican Party, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, celebrated the decision but noted it came too late to make a difference in the November election.
Michigan Republicans say they were certain from the outset that Benson had obviously violated Michigan law. Yet, all of this seems to have been swept under the rug until now in the media:
“It was clear from the outset that the secretary of state had violated Election Law by unilaterally directing local clerks to ignore their statutory obligation to compare absentee ballot signatures,” said Ted Goodman, communications director for the state GOP.
Michigan law requires clerks to match required signatures on absentee ballot applications and absentee ballot envelopes with the voter signature on file to ensure the person submitting the ballot is the same one registered to vote in Michigan.
But state law doesn’t define what it means for signatures to “agree sufficiently.”
Benson, on Oct. 6, instructed clerks who were matching signatures that they “must perform” their duties under the “presumption” that the signature is valid and uphold the signature’s validity if there were “more matching features than nonmatching features.” Whenever possible, clerks and election officials were instructed to resolve slight differences “in favor of finding that the voter’s signature was valid,” Murray wrote.
Absentee and mail-in ballots tend to favor Democrats dramatically. So, if clerks are instructed to be more lenient with them, it goes to reason that the total Democrat vote will be increased significantly if signature verification measures are ignored or made laxer.
“The judge didn’t rule on whether Benson’s directive violated state election law but did say the directive violated the Administrative Procedures Act, the process that must be followed when an agency creates new rules.
“….Nowhere in the state’s election law has the Legislature indicated that signatures are to be presumed valid, nor did the Legislature require that signatures are to be accepted so long as there are any redeeming qualities in the application or return envelope signature as compared with the signature on file,” Murray wrote.
“Policy determinations like the one at issue — which places a thumb on the scale in favor of a signature’s validity — should be made pursuant to properly promulgated rules under the APA or by the Legislature,” he wrote.
So, what gives here? The judge stated that Benson’s directive “violated the Administrative Procedures Act” but also stated that she didn’t violate election law. How can this be? And, if a law was broken or ignored, why did the judge not require a proper audit of the election by someone other than Benson?
Murray rejected a request for additional audits to look at the effect the directive had on the November election.
The Michigan Constitution only speaks to “election results,” not to the process by which signatures are matched, and the Constitution leaves the manner by which an audit is conducted to the secretary of state.
“There is no support in the statute for plaintiffs to demand that an audit cover the subject of their choosing or to dictate the manner in which an audit is conducted,” Murray wrote.”
If all of this was so obvious, why was nothing done about it until now? If Benson does the same thing (or worse) in the 2022 election, will anything come of it? Other than temporarily embarrassing Michigan’s dirty SOS, there appear to be no serious repercussions for Jocelyn Benson.