The Latest Scheme to Rig Elections in Michigan

Authored by Becky Behrends, published in American Thinker on November 3, 2022

The witches’ brew of election-rigging continues to bubble over.  Michigan citizens will soon decide the fate of election integrity and security in their state as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach.

Proposal 2, known as the Right to Voting Policies Amendment or, more commonly, the Promote the Vote initiative, is a cauldron of potential election malfeasance.  If it passes, it will become embedded in the state constitution.  We have previously discussed egregious aspects of this proposal.

One little known aspect of Proposal 2 is that it would permit the combining of precincts through absentee voter counting boards.  This would result in the loss of precinct-level results.

Here is why this is important and disturbing.

In a 2022 primary election in DeKalb County, Ga., a Democrat commissioner’s race had a machine programming error, which caused one of the candidates, Michelle Long Spears, to get zero votes in multiple precincts.  In fact, it was referred to as a “perfect storm” of issues that led to inaccurate results.  Spears knew that she and her husband had voted for her in their own precinct as well as family and friends, so how could the vote be zero?  The only way she caught the error was by looking at precinct-level results.  She was granted a hand recount and went from last to first in the District 2 primary race.

If you look at the AVCB (Absent Voter Counting Board) in 2020 in Detroit, they had 503 precincts but only 134 counting boards.  So they were combining precincts into counting boards.  The problem is that when they reported the results, the precinct totals disappear, and it was one number that was reported from the AVCB.  Below is a hypothetical example of how this situation could occur (as in DeKalb) but not be caught.  Obviously, there is something wrong with precincts 2 and 3, but that is hidden because the precincts are combined.

The DeKalb county commissioner’s race was judged to be due to human and machine error.  But “hiding” precinct level results would also make it far easier for bad actors to manipulate votes and especially mess with down-ballot race results.  These races are often determined by a very thin margin of votes.

In the 2020 general election in Detroit, 72% of the AVCB results were “out of balance,” meaning that the number of votes tabulated by the voting machines did not match the number of voters recorded in the electronic poll books (EPBs).  And yet, by state law, because they were out of balance, a recount could not be done.  What were the vote tallies in each individual precinct?  Were the ballots legitimate?  Were signatures properly verified?  We will never know.  Centralizing vote numbers does not allow us to know what happens in each precinct, where mistakes or intentional malfeasance could be more easily tracked.

There were many aspects of the 2020 general election that demonstrated a serious lack of election integrity and security despite the tiresome and repetitious media assertions to the contrary.

We need to stop allowing the Democrats to poke more holes into the attempts to keep elections fair, honest, and secure.  It has become a game of whack-a-mole.  Get rid of one assault on security, and another one pops up.

Michigan Citizens need to vote no on Prop 2!