LANSING — In case you missed it, the New York Times released an extensive and detailed report yesterday exposing Trump’s Michigan MAGA allies’ latest coordinated attempt to use new data tools and debunked legal theories to persuade election officials to suppress Michiganders’ votes.
As the NYT’s investigation revealed, MAGA extremists in Michigan have rolled out the use of a data program called Check My Vote, which falsely identifies “suspicious” voters, targeting primarily Democratic areas and arming extremists to challenge completely valid voter registrations by the thousands. The program, endorsed by the Michigan GOP and cited by the Trump campaign, has already enabled right-wing extremists in Michigan to challenge thousands of Michiganders’ voter registrations and successfully remove active, valid voters from voter rolls.
The bombshell story once again exposes the Michigan GOP for what they are: anti-democratic MAGA cronies involved in an effort to challenge voter registrations in counties across Michigan with the intent of removing voters from the rolls en masse and suppressing Michiganders’ right to vote this November.
This story comes on the heels of the MI GOP cementing themselves as the party of MAGA Trump this weekend, sending an additional 39 delegates for Trump to the RNC nominating convention.
Michigan Dems are already fighting back – our Secretary of State has told the Waterford Township clerk to reinstate the voters, saying the removals did not follow the process laid out in state and federal law, and issued a warning about Check My Vote’s antics.
We must remain vigilant. We know MAGA extremists’ limits have no bounds when it comes to their goals of suppressing the vote. This is the key to their playbook, given they cannot win on their widely unpopular, radical issue agenda.
Read the full story here and check some highlights below to see first-hand how the MIGOP is attempting to disenfranchise Michiganders this November.
- In Michigan, activists call their project Soles to the Rolls — an apparent play on Souls to the Polls, the get-out-the-vote effort popular in Black churches.
- The undertaking pulls from every corner of the election-denial movement. Its parent group is an offshoot of [Cleta] Mitchell’s national network…The state’s Republican Party, which is mired in a leadership dispute, has also endorsed the data program.
- Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing. The bigger risk, they note, is disenfranchising voters.
- That program, called Check My Vote, identifies addresses with irregularities, such as missing an apartment number or having an unusually high number of registered voters.
- “That’s just garbage,” Chris Thomas, an elections consultant for Detroit, said of the analysis. “It’s targeting lower income, immigrants and students.”
- In Waterford, an activist submitted to Kim Markee, the town clerk, the names of more than 1,000 voters they claimed had moved away and were no longer eligible. The names were pulled from the U.S. Postal Service’s mail-forwarding list, a database that includes snowbirds, active-duty military personnel and others still legally eligible to vote at their residence … an employee later discovered that one of the dropped voters was serving in the Air Force in Illinois…In January, Michigan’s secretary of state demanded that Ms. Markee reinstate all the voters who had not confirmed that they had moved.
- But even when they fail, the challenges have consequences. In some states, a challenge alone is enough to limit a voter’s access to a mail ballot, or to require additional documentation at the polls. Privately, activists have said they consider that a victory.
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