Michigan group releases 2020 election report, urges further probes

It looked at statutes, court rulings, sworn testimony, official records, and FOIA-obtained documents, ultimately recommended further investigation by both federal and state authorities.

“Michigan Fair Elections Institute believed it is important to have a comprehensive accounting of election administration issues that have arisen since 2020,” Patrice Johnson, founder and chair of the institute exclusively told The Center Square. “This report is more than a recounting of Michigan’s experience of the 2020 election. The expansion of Secretary of State’s role in Michigan is ongoing; the centralization of election processes in Lansing has been incremental but it has also been unrelenting.”

The 2020 election, in which now-President Donald Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, was highly controversial.

Questions surrounding the election results and allegations of irregularities or fraud have fueled widespread debate and scrutiny. This has been especially the case in Michigan, where Trump lost by 2.8%.

Trump called out the results as recently as July, as previously reported by The Center Square.

“Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan in 2020,” Trump said during a primetime address to the nation. “It was pay, play, and cheat.”

The “Michigan Election Issues 2020 and Ripple Effects” report from MFEI documented 15 different findings relating to everything from voter roll maintenance to ballot chain of custody.

“The purpose of the report is to document, to provide a record of how radically Michigan’s elections have changed since 2020 and to identify areas that still need investigation or legislative reform,” Johnson told The Center Square. “One of the strengths of Michigan elections is its decentralized structure. Clerks are elected officials in their own right with authority and responsibilities. We can’t let that slip away under the cover of non-legislative rule changes or opaque procedures that require citizens to ‘just trust’ the system.”

The common thread among the 15 findings is an ongoing effort by the state to centralize Michigan’s elections over the past few decades, culminating in the past several years – efforts the report called “legally unauthorized.”

“The counts document a recurring pattern that accelerated following the 2019 transition in executive leadership,” the report said. “This transition was characterized by the increasing use of executive orders and actions that bypassed constitutionally required legislative enactment.”

It added that many of its findings are echoed in a July letter from the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

“The department identified suspected deficiencies . . . all matters warranting immediate attention,” the report said. “These same statutory subjects recur throughout this report.”

Of the 15 counts, they include findings on:

• Executive and administrative oversight: “A documented pattern of election-rulemaking authority consolidated in the executive branch.”

• Voter roll maintenance

• Oversight, speech, and overseas voting

• Absentee ballot and Election Day administration

• Poll challenger access, voting systems, and canvass integrity

• Third-party involvement and physical ballot evidence

• Election infrastructure procurement

Johnson said that while the report was based on volunteer research “grounded in primary-source records,” the MFEI hopes it will lead to tangible action from lawmakers and the state to address “oversight gaps” ahead of the 2026 election, which is just 61 days away.

She argued that restoring public confidence in Michigan’s elections will ultimately require greater transparency and citizen involvement.

“Trust Michiganders. Involve citizens in a system that is transparent and open for inspection and true accountability,” Johnson told The Center Square. “That is the way to restore confidence in election administration. Transparency would likely lessen much of the complexity in our elections.”