Statement from Michigan House Elections Vice Chair: 2020 Trump Electors are Innocent

Last week, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against 16 Trump electors who submitted their votes as alternates amidst belief that there would be an honest investigation into the 2020 election.

The charges include forgery, election fraud, and conspiracy.

The Gateway Pundit published a video where the electors publicly called their votes a “back up slate” and affirmed, “this is not a replacement.”  Their actions were to give a “life vote” to Michigan legislators under the presumption that there would be an honest investigation/audit of the Michigan election, especially in Wayne County, where canvassers initially refused to certify the vote because of an imbalance in 70% of the 134 absentee counting boards in Detroit.

Michigan’s House Elections Vice Chair, Rep. Rachelle Smit, has released a statement arguing that what the electors did was “completely legal, completely valid, and anticipating that there would be an honest investigation into Michigan voter fraud.”

“The Trump electors were preserving the ability for a voter fraud investigation to happen after December 15, 2020.  The Trump electors committed no forgery, no fraud, and zero violation of Michigan’s election laws.  Dana Nessel knows this, but she brought charges against these people anyway.  Our Michigan AG is an absolute disgrace to the rule of law.  This is a political prosecution by an attorney general who shamelessly abuses the law for the basest of political motives.  Dana Nessel, as attorney general, is a threat to the rule of law and our system of governance.”

From Fox2 on Nov 17, 2020:

It comes with a condition Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson conduct an audit of the unexplained precincts in Wayne County where numbers did not match.

After initially split on the vote to verify the election results from Wayne County, the board of canvassers ultimately revised their vote and unanimously voted to certify the will of the people.

Director of Michigan Bureau of Elections Jonathan Brater explained that:

“What we’re going to be doing today is rolling 20 dice, 10-sided dice, to create a random number that we’re then going to put into a computer algorithm that will tell us which of these ballots from all across the state that we’re going to randomly pull.  And then we’re going to compare about 18,000 ballots that we randomly pull to the machine tabulated totals, to confirm within a statistical level of certainty that the outcome of the election was correct.”

There was not an honest investigation into Wayne County’s canvassing board’s imbalance that we can find.  There was, however, a statewide “risk-limiting audit” of 18,000 ballots out of 5.45 million (00.3%), using “auditing software to randomly select ballots that will be pulled from any one of Michigan’s 1,520 local election jurisdictions and hand-reviewed.”   Looking for 3 or 4% of potentially fraudulent ballots in a universe of 5.45 million (~218,000) by only looking at 00.3% of a universe is in line with the proverbial “finding a needle in a haystack”.  If you had 1,000 ballots, you would be looking at just 3 ballots total.  If 4% of the ballots were fraudulent, those 3 ballots would have to find 40 in a universe of 1,000.

Further, this “risk-limiting audit” does nothing to provide answers regarding missing chain of custody documents, ballot deliveries 3.5 hours after polls closed with a single driver with Indiana plates (no party observers),  late night ballot drops at 4am escorted twice by a car with Pennsylvania plates,  and again, in 2022, similar late night drops (in 2022, Michigan Democrats took control of the state legislature).

The weaponized Michigan AG’s office is pressing charges for actions that there is precedent for in the United States:  in 1960, Hawaii sent an “alternate slate of electors” after a contested election between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  Kennedy’s three electors signed their own certificates and sent them to Washington.  Eventually, after recounts and an investigation, Hawaii’s “alternate” electors were sat and Hawaii was given to Kennedy

From Politico:

By December 1960, it was clear Kennedy had won. Only Hawaii’s result remained in doubt. Nixon had prevailed by just 140 votes, according to the initial results, which were certified by the governor. A recount was underway on Dec. 19, 1960, when presidential electors across the nation were required by law to meet and cast their ballots.

Nixon’s Hawaii electors met and cast their three votes in an official ceremony. But nearby, Kennedy’s three elector nominees gathered and signed their own certificates, delivering them to Washington as though Kennedy had won the state.