Trump Lawsuit Alleges Rampant Violations at Detroit Vote Counting Center

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign sued Michigan in federal court late on Nov. 10, alleging pervasive violations of election laws at a vote-counting center in Detroit.

The witnesses detail a battery of problems with the handling, processing, and counting of the votes, including instances in which election officials ignored their challenges.

“Michigan’s election code contains a host of provisions intended to prevent fraudulent ballots from being counted. A fraudulent ballot, if counted, disenfranchises a lawful voter,” the summary of the lawsuit states.

The campaign is asking the court to order the state and county canvassing boards to not certify any election results that contain ballots that were processed when Republican observers were blocked from having adequate access to observe the counting process, as well as any tally that contains unlawfully cast ballots.

The campaign is also pointing to an alleged software tabulation error to request that any ballots processed by the same software be counted by hand.

In a statement, Jake Rollow, the spokesman for the Michigan Department of State, said the lawsuit is “a press release masquerading as a legal claim.”

“This is the same kind of irresponsible false rhetoric and misinformation that we saw throughout the election,” Rollow said. “But it does not change the truth: Michigan’s elections were conducted fairly, securely, transparently, and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people.”

David Fink, an attorney for the City of Detroit Mayor’s Office, called the lawsuit’s claim “baseless.”

As a result, there were more Democratic challengers observing the count than Republicans. One witness estimated the ratio at 2 to 1. Another said that at one point, there were 10 Democrats on the counting floor for each Republican.

The election officials allegedly treated Republican observers differently from Democrats, including by enforcing a six-foot distance rule with Republicans while letting Democrats get closer to the tables. At least 19 witnesses said their challenges to the counting process were ignored.

When Christopher Schornak raised a challenge, a poll worker told him, “We are not talking to you, you cannot challenge this.” When Stephanie Krause attempted a challenge, an election official said challenges were no longer being accepted because the “rules ‘no longer applied.’” Mary Shinkle, another challenger, said she could not observe a ballot being duplicated because “if we make a mistake, then you would be all over us.”

In 18 of the sworn affidavits, the witnesses claim that election officials counted ballots that included names that weren’t on the voter file. These voters were added into the system with the date of birth of Jan. 1, 1900. In 16 of the sworn affidavits, witnesses claim to have seen mismatched numbers on ballots and their envelopes.

“When challenger Abbie Helminen raised a challenge that the name on the ballot envelope did not match the name on the voter list, she was told by an election official to ‘get away’ and that the counting table she was observing had ‘a different process than other tables,’” the lawsuit states.

In an allegation disputed by both the software vendor and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and other GOP officials said that a glitch in the Dominion software switched 6,000 GOP votes to Democrats. The software was used in 47 Michigan counties.

“Secretary of State Benson released a statement blaming the county clerk for not updating certain ‘media drives,’ but her statement failed to provide any coherent explanation of how the Dominion Voting Systems software and vote tabulators produced such a massive miscount,” the lawsuit states.

Benson said that the error was remedied once it was discovered.

“What Secretary Benson fails to address is what would have happened if no one ‘discover[ed] the error,’ for instance, in Wayne County, where the number of registered voters is much greater than Antrim County, and where the tabulators were not individually tested,” the lawsuit states. The state of Texas rejected Dominion’s voting software after an extensive review.