Michigan’s elections committee to be led by former clerk who believes 2020 was stolen | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

State Rep. Rachelle Smit, a former local clerk who believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Donald Trump, will run the Michigan House’s committee on elections under the new GOP leadership. Smit, a Republican from Martin, was named the chair of the House’s Election Integrity Committee, as it has now been renamed. Her claims that the 2020 election was stolen have been roundly debunked but won her an endorsement from President Donald Trump, who praised her as someone “who knows our Elections are not secure, and that there was rampant Voter Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election.” Read Article

Michigan GOP proposes proof-of-citizenship requirement for voters | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

A new proposal from a top Michigan House Republican seeks to require would-be voters to provide proof that they are U.S. citizens when they register. The proposal to amend the state constitution isn’t likely to pass the Legislature with required two-thirds support, but conservatives are already gearing up for a petition drive to try to put the proposal before voters on the 2026 ballot. The proposed amendment is the latest in a growing movement across the United States to create barriers to noncitizen voting, even though there’s little evidence that a significant number of noncitizens try to vote. Federal laws already ban noncitizens from voting in elections, and the risks for them are high, including felony charges and the loss of their residency status. Read Article

Michigan’s GOP House rebrands committee to spotlight ‘election integrity’ | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

After taking control of the Michigan House of Representatives, Republican lawmakers have begun shaping their election policy priorities. They’ve made one conspicuous change already: renaming the House’s Elections Committee — a standing body that outlives the control of any one party — the Election Integrity Committee. Republicans in Michigan and around the country continue to push the theme of election integrity as a counterweight to Democratic efforts to expand voting access. Whether the committee name change amounts to a mere branding exercise, or represents a firm marker of election policy priorities for Michigan’s House leaders will become clearer in the coming weeks, as members of the committee are chosen and leaders lay out their agenda. For now, it makes Michigan one of the first few states to have a legislative group dedicated by name to the idea of election integrity. Read Article

Michigan: Trump’s false 2020 electors make renewed bid to get charges dropped | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

In a series of new court filings, Michigan Republicans who signed a certificate falsely claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 election contended their actions amounted to “participating in the political process” and urged a judge to dismiss their charges. The new filings provided the most detailed look yet at false electors’ defense arguments. They also represented an attempt to knock down felony charges that Nessel, a Democrat, announced in July 2023 against the 16 Michigan Republicans whose names appeared on the false certificates, which were used by the Trump campaign in an unsuccessful bid to overturn his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Read Article

Michigan Senate votes forward proposed penalties for spreading false election information | Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance

Late in the evening on Thursday, members of the Michigan Senate voted along party lines to advance a bill creating fines for intentionally making a false statement about Michigan elections. Senate Bill 707 specifies individuals who knowingly misrepresent the time, place or manner of an election; the qualifications or restrictions on voter eligibility; criminal penalties associated with voting in an election; an individuals’ voter registration status or eligibility would be subject to a fine of up to $1,000 for each violation. The bill clarifies that an individual has intentionally and knowingly made a false statement or representation if they know it is false and make the statement with the intent to hinder or prevent another individual from voting in an election. Read Article

Michigan looks to strengthen petition-gathering laws after 2022 gubernatorial debacle | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Democrats in the Michigan Legislature are attempting to pass a slew of bills to revamp the regulations around how signatures are gathered and verified on petitions to get statewide candidates and issues on the ballot. The legislation aims to avert the type of fiasco seen in 2022, when five Republican gubernatorial candidates and several judicial candidates were kept off the ballot because of thousands of fraudulent signatures on their nominating petitions. The bills would disincentivize paid signature gatherers — called circulators — from collecting fake signatures or those obtained by lying about the issue on the petition. Michigan has relatively few restrictions on those who collect signatures, a necessary task for candidates to get on the ballot and a hallmark of any public space during an election year. If enacted, the legislation could reshape how signature collection takes place by changing how circulators are paid and how those signatures are processed. Read Article

Michigan Voting Rights Act moves forward despite concerns from local clerks | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

A set of bills that would expand voting rights for non-English speakers and voters with disabilities is moving closer to becoming state law after the House elections committee voted Tuesday to advance the bills championed by Democrats and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. In a vote along party lines, the committee passed four bills that make up the proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act. Next, the bills will go before the entire House for a vote. They were approved by the Senate back in September after spending nearly a year in that chamber’s committee. The bills aim to expand ballot access by providing ballots in more languages, create a voting data clearinghouse, codify protections for voters who may need help casting their ballot, and broadly aim to prevent voting suppression. Read Article

Michigan managed to speed up election results, but some things just take time | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Michigan set itself up to blaze through its 2024 ballot counts. New policies were in the state’s favor, including pre-processing of absentee ballots as well as early in-person voting, and voters and election officials took full advantage. But elections are ultimately a human process, from who participates in them to who runs them. And it was mostly a set of human factors that prevented the state from releasing unofficial results until the middle of the day on Wednesday. Getting results any faster in future elections is likely to prove difficult, officials say. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to try. Read Article

Michigan: Here’s how initial unofficial election results got messed up for 5 counties | Paul Egan/Detroit Free Press

County clerks would like Michigan voters to know that unofficial election results are just that — unofficial and potentially subject to change. Errors in the initial results the state posted from Kent, Kalamazoo, Leelanau, Calhoun and Allegan counties threw off totals by close to 50,000 votes. That’s less than 1% of the more than 5.5 million ballots cast statewide, but the updated unofficial numbers will likely change the anticipated outcome of a statewide race for the MSU Board of Trustees and potentially impact one state House race and at least one local race. Clerks stress that in cases where initial posted results were incomplete, the actual results — and therefore the actual outcomes of races — never changed. The votes were in those cases correctly tabulated. Where mistakes happened, they say, is in how the initial results were reported, with some results from some precincts being initially omitted from what counties and/or the state posted online. Any such errors in unofficial numbers would have been caught in the canvassing of the results, which in many counties is still underway, but in fact were caught before the canvasses even began, clerks say. Read Article/a>

Michigan: She fought to restore trust in an election system Trump attacked. Then he won. | David Maraniss/The Washington Post

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, had just concluded an election night news conference at Ford Field extolling the virtues of the vote when she learned that Donald Trump might be on his way to reclaiming the presidency. She had worked relentlessly all year, and all of that long final day and night, trying to ensure that citizens in her state experienced a calm, safe and accessible election, only to see it lead to the restoration of a man and a movement that seemed the opposite of almost everything she believes in. Although Benson is a Democrat who supported Kamala Harris in a state crucial to the vice president’s chances, she was also the overseer of a nonpartisan election system. As disappointed as she might have been by the national result, her faith in democracy compelled her to accept it. Read Article

Michigan Clerks Removed From Election Duty Over Plans for a Hand Count | Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

Two local election officials in Michigan have been removed from overseeing the vote, state officials said on Tuesday, in a forceful move to keep Trump-aligned officials from trying to subvert election rules. Tom Schierkolk, the clerk of Rock River Township in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and his deputy, David LaMere, were removed after telling state officials that they intended to hand count ballots before sending their tally on for the county canvass, according to a letter that Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s elections director, sent to Mr. Schierkolk on Monday informing him of the decision. Mr. Schierkolk is tied to a network of activists who have pushed several baseless theories about corruption in elections and, at times, advocated the hand-counting of ballots, apparently believing that electronic voting machines are insecure. Donald J. Trump and his allies spread the idea widely after his defeat in 2020, claiming, falsely, that the machines had changed the votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Reead Article

‘Is it going to be safe?’: Suspicions and fear dominate a crucial Michigan county in lead-up to US election | Chris McGreal/The Guardian

Vanessa Guerra is resigned to questions from Donald Trump’s supporters about the many ways in which American voters imagine next month’s presidential election might be rigged against him. But more recently the Saginaw county clerk, who is overseeing the ballot in a highly contested patch of central Michigan, has faced a new line of questioning at meetings called to reassure distrustful voters. “I did a presentation last week and, as usual, we had a lot of questions about the validity of election results. But now they’re also asking: Is it going to be safe to go to the polls on election day? Is something going to happen? That’s something new,” said Guerra. Read Article

Michigan doesn’t have more active registered voters than residents | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

A misleading claim promoted by right-wing activists has gained traction through X owner Elon Musk and other supporters of Donald Trump, feeding a false impression that there’s something wrong with Michigan’s voter rolls. The claim — that Michigan has more voters than people eligible to vote — has been debunked extensively by the state as well as independent experts. A federal court ruling this week weighed in on a similar GOP claim, finding flaws in the comparison of data points and no proof that the discrepancy amounts to a violation of law, just as previous courts have found. Musk and others cite the data points to argue that the discrepancy could enable fraudulent voting. The claim is based on a misunderstanding about the makeup of the state’s voter roll and what it means in relation to Census population data. It ignores the fact that the total number of registrations on the roll includes a large number of voters who are marked as inactive but who must be kept on the roll for several years under federal law. Most of those voters likely are no longer residents of the state. Read Article

Michigan judge says RNC suit challenging overseas voters could ‘disenfranchise an entire group of citizens’ | Josh Gerstein/Politico

A Michigan judge suggested Thursday that Republicans waited too long to file a suit challenging the right of some U.S. citizens who live abroad to vote in the swing state. During an hourlong hearing in Detroit, Judge Sima Patel said that delay and the proximity to the election were the “biggest hurdle” facing a suit the Republican National Committee and the Michigan Republican Party filed Oct. 8 to disqualify voters who registered in the state as the spouses or dependents of U.S. citizens living overseas. A Michigan law and guidance from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson allow a spouse or dependent accompanying a Michigan resident overseas to cast a ballot in Michigan, as long as they aren’t registered elsewhere in the U.S. Read Article

Michigan: ‘What the hell’: Sheriffs dive into presidential race | Craig Mauger and Melissa Nann Burke/The Detroit News

Some Michigan sheriffs in charge of enforcing the law in their counties have gotten heavily involved this year in a heated presidential race, drawing criticism from opponents who argue the politicking — often done in uniform — has gone too far. From both sides of the aisle, sheriffs, elected on a partisan basis in Michigan, have been attempting to navigate a challenging political climate. Some have exercised their freedom to endorse candidates, while one sheriff used government resources for a campaign event to make a political contribution that’s now under investigation over its legality. Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy, a Republican, used his government email account in August to help organize a campaign event for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump that took place inside a sheriff’s department garage. Read Article

Michigan poll challengers get new state guidelines for 2024 election | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Michigan poll challengers face stricter rules going into the November election, part of a wave of new requirements that aim to prevent some of the disruptions that marred the ballot counting process four years ago. Poll challengers — distinct from poll workers and poll watchers — are individuals stationed at polling places and vote-counting centers who have unique powers under Michigan law to challenge a voter’s eligibility or question the way officials are doing their jobs. Their role in Michigan elections drew national attention in 2020, when some poll challengers who were kept out of a ballot processing center in Detroit that was filled to capacity began banging on the windows and demanding a halt to the count. Read Article

Michigan: No, officials aren’t stealing your votes in Bay County | Joey Oliver/Mlive.com

Officials with the Michigan State Police said a pair of people inside a Bay County township’s hall late Monday evening were there on official business and are dispelling rumors that they were tampering with voting equipment. Lt. Kimberly Vetter, the spokesperson for the state police’s third district, said troopers responded to the Beaver Township Hall late Monday, Sept. 23, after a caller said they went inside the building after noticing the lights inside were on. The caller, who according to Bay County 911 calls identified himself as an area firefighter, said he went inside the building and found two women claiming to be employees of the Beaver Township Clerk’s Office taking apart a “voting machine.” Vetter said troopers who responded to the scene were able to verify the two women were members of the clerk’s office and were conducting legitimate business in preparation for the Nov. 5 General Election. Read Article

Michigan: A contentious race to be a tiny Antrim County’s top election official | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

Sheryl Guy planned to oversee one last presidential election, and she hoped it would go more smoothly than last time. In 2020, the clerk in northern Michigan’s sparsely populated Antrim County initially misreported that Joe Biden won the heavily Republican area. Within days she corrected the tabulations with the accurate vote totals, but the error still provided fodder for far-fetched theories that spread across the country as Donald Trump falsely claimed he had won. Guy, 63, has weathered vilification, lawsuits and death threats. She was looking forward to retirement after the election this fall — until she realized who might take her job. Winning a five-way Republican primary for county clerk last month was Victoria Bishop, who promised to shake up the office, hand-count ballots and scrub people from the voter rolls. With no Democrat running, Bishop was all but assured of winning in November. This gnawed at Guy, who recently left the Republican Party and views Bishop’s pledges as signals that she will entertain the kinds of baseless claims that thrust the county into national headlines in 2020 and eroded public trust in elections. She decided to launch a write-in campaign to try to keep her job. Read Article

Michigan charts ‘proactive, preemptive’ plan to curb election challenges in 2024 | Sam Brodey/Boston Globe

Four years ago in Detroit, two Republican members of the normally low-profile Wayne County Board of Canvassers did something unprecedented: They declined to certify the results of the 2020 general election. Citing unfounded claims of voter fraud, the officials on the board disregarded their longstanding role to validate election results, as required by law, after recording the vote tally. In one swoop, they threw the entire state’s result into question, garnering national coverage and public outcry in the process. While the chaos they caused was brief — despite pressure from then-president Trump, the officials relented after two hours and voted to certify Wayne County’s results — the impact of the episode reverberated long afterward Anticipating fresh challenges this November, election officials in Michigan have undertaken the most aggressive effort among battleground states to ensure that the vulnerability exposed in Wayne County in 2020 will be difficult to exploit in 2024. Read Article

A Michigan canvasser said he might not certify the election. Now the ACLU is suing him. | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan is suing a member of the Kalamazoo County Board of Canvassers, hoping a judge will declare that the man must certify the November election results, after a newspaper reported him saying that he might not. The suit is part of a growing legal effort around the country to ensure that the November election is certified on time by making it clear to any potentially defiant officials that they’re not allowed to refuse to certify, and that they could face charges or penalties if they do. The ACLU suit follows a Detroit News report that Robert Froman, a 73-year-old Republican canvasser in Kalamazoo County, said he would not certify the 2024 presidential election if it went the same way as the 2020 election, which he believed was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Read Article

Michigan: In small towns, even GOP clerks are targets of election conspiracies | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

Deep in the thumb of Michigan’s mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula, Republican election officials are outcasts in their rural communities. Michigan cities already were familiar with the consequences of election conspiracy theories. In 2020, Republicans flooded Detroit’s ballot counting center looking for fraud. Democratic and Republican election officials faced an onslaught of threats. And conservative activists attempted to tamper with election equipment. But the clerks who serve tiny conservative townships around Lake Huron never thought the hatred would be directed toward them. “I’m telling you — I’ve heard about everything I could hear,” said Theresa Mazure, the clerk for the 700 residents of Hume Township in Huron County. “I just shake my head. And when you try to explain, all I hear is, ‘Well, that’s just the Democrats talking.’ No, it’s the democratic process.” Read Article

Michigan: Big wins for GOP candidates who spread election falsehoods | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

A self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriff,” a township clerk facing felony charges, and a county clerk candidate who wants to “hand count every ballot cast at the end of each voting day” sailed through their Republican primaries Tuesday, earning themselves spots on November’s ballot and likely victory. The results are a sign that many local voters in more conservative areas of Michigan don’t consider it disqualifying for local elected officials to spread conspiracy theories or interfere with elections to advance the narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump. In Barry County, north of Kalamazoo, incumbent Sheriff Dar Leaf handily beat three GOP challengers. In Macomb County, Shelby Township Clerk Stan Grot did the same. Victoria Bishop, a clerk candidate in Antrim County, claimed victory in a five-way GOP race with about 37% of the vote. Read Article

Michigan: Power outages and humid ink barely mar a smooth day of voting in low turnout primary | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Even after nine days of early voting and 40 days to return absentee ballots, Michigan’s August primary appeared to be a relatively low turnout election. Officials said the majority of voters had already cast their ballots before election day on Tuesday. As of Monday, more than 1 million people across the state had voted, the vast majority of them doing so absentee. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Tuesday night that she expected totals to be near 2 million, which would be less than a quarter of the state’s total registered voters. In 2022, there were more than 2.1 million votes cast in Michigan’s August primary. Four years ago, there were more than 2.5 million votes cast. Read Article

Michigan faces a shortage of local clerk candidates, raising alarms about how elections will be run | Jon King/Michigan Advance

They are the administrators of democracy, making sure that elections are free, fair and efficient. They maintain the records of local government and are responsible for public access to those records, including births, deaths and the marriages in between.  And yet, nearly 10% of the 1,240 township clerk positions that are up for election this year in Michigan have no candidates willing to step up and fill them. That’s according to Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist, who also serves as second vice president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks (MAMC). In a social media post this month, Siegrist pointed to the situation as one that’s not been experienced before. “What if I told you that 118 townships have nobody running for Clerk this year. We’ve never seen anything like this in history. 9.5% of all clerk races this year will have NOBODY elected,” he said, before posing a series of questions. “Why doesn’t anyone want to do this job? How does a state deal with such a massive labor shortage? Who will run elections in these communities?” Read Article

Michigan has fix in place after brief outage in early-voter check-in system | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

An overloaded server briefly brought Michigan’s voter check-in system to a crawl Saturday morning, a hiccup on the first day of early in-person voting in the state primary that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says she is “confident” won’t happen again. The error was the result of other applications running on the same server that also hosted the state’s electronic poll books, Benson said during a news conference Monday. When voting started, those hundreds of poll book connections plus those other applications “caused a spike in activity” that tied up the servers and forced clerks around the state to temporarily switch to paper voter records. The Secretary of State’s Office worked with the Department of Technology, Management and Budget to discuss a solution that prioritizes early voting over other applications and protects access to the servers, Benson said. Read Article

Michigan: Trump campaign sues Gretchen Whitmer to block veteran voter registration sites | Griffin Eckstein/Salon

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has filed a lawsuit against Michigan officials, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, to block a directive to designate Veterans Affairs offices and other public facilities as voter registration sites. Per the lawsuit, filed Monday, the Trump campaign seeks a “permanent injunction barring the state … from designating any VRAs [voter registration agencies] without express authorization from the Michigan Legislature.” The directive — which would have instituted registration offices in Michigan Veterans Affairs, Worker’s Disability Compensation Agency and U.S. Small Business Administration offices — would have enabled Michiganders to check, update, and join the voter rolls more easily. Read Article

Michigan judge calls off hearing on alleged voter data breach to allow for appeal | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

A Hillsdale County judge suddenly called off a preliminary examination scheduled for Thursday morning to allow a former township clerk and lawyer, facing felony charges over an alleged voter data breach, to fight the allegations in a higher court. After district court Judge Megan Stiverson announced her decision, Richard Cunningham, the prosecutor in the cases for the Michigan Attorney General’s office, could be heard telling others in the courtroom that he was “shocked.” Two days earlier on Tuesday, Stiverson rejected a motion to immediately dismiss the charges from Dan Hartman, the attorney who’s representing former Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott and Stefanie Lambert, a lawyer involved in efforts to advance unproven election fraud claims in multiple battleground states. In her ruling, Stiverson specifically said the preliminary examination to decide whether the charges should proceed to trial would go forward “as scheduled” Thursday. However, at the start of the hearing, Hartman revealed that he wanted to challenge Stiverson’s Tuesday order in Hillsdale County Circuit Court. Read Article

Michigan: What cost comparisons show about  early in-person voting models | Tom Perkins/Votebeat

The city of Ann Arbor recorded one of the state’s highest rates of early in-person voting in the February primary, and a Votebeat analysis shows it also succeeded in another important measure: It kept the cost per vote low. Ann Arbor spent about $19 per early in-person vote, among the lowest of dozens of municipalities included in the analysis, which gauged only recurring costs like labor. In Lansing, a city similar in size to Ann Arbor, the cost per vote was triple — around $58 — and the turnout rate much lower. Meanwhile, in sparsely populated Ontonagon County in the Upper Peninsula, municipal election officials banded together under a countywide plan. Ontonagon County spent about $63 per vote, though that cost was spread among a dozen municipalities. Read Article

Michigan Supreme Court weighs legality of Secretary of State’s guidance on election challengers | Beth LeBlanc/The Detroit News

Michigan Supreme Court justices will decide in the coming weeks whether guidelines issued by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to govern the handling of challengers at polling places can withstand the scrutiny of Republican opponents. Justices heard about an hour of argument Tuesday over Zoom on a case that challenges a manual issued by Benson to clerks in 2022 that set out instructions for election challengers, including a uniform credential form for challengers, limits on when their challenges should be recorded and bans on electronic device possession in closed-door absentee voting counting rooms while polling precincts are open. Several election challengers and the state and national Republican parties filed suit soon after the guidelines were issued, arguing they conflict with state election law and constituted rules that should have gone through the rulemaking process. Read Article

Michigan Judge Largely Denies RNC’s Challenge To Absentee Ballot Signature Matching Rules | Rachel Selzer/Democracy Docket

A Michigan judge today largely rejected the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) bid to tighten the state’s instructions for verifying signatures on absentee ballot applications and return envelopes ahead of the 2024 election. As a result of today’s ruling, election officials in the consequential battleground state may continue to apply most of the current signature matching rules promulgated by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D). Election officials cannot, however, utilize a slightly more lenient standard contained in the state’s guidance — known as a “presumption of validity” — when verifying signatures, the judge concluded. Read Article