One reason so many people are willing to disbelieve election results in this country is that too many election officials ignore laws requiring them to maintain the integrity of voter rolls.
Witness the state of Michigan, sued last week by a watchdog group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation for failing and even refusing to remove 25,975 dead people from its lists of supposedly eligible voters. The lawsuit notes that “of those, 23,663 registrants have been dead for five years or more, 17,479 registrants have been dead for at least ten years, and 3,956 registrants have been dead for at least twenty years.”
PILF found that at least 334 voters were registered after they had died. In other words, yes, voter fraud is real. Some scofflaws appear to be registering dead people who were not previously registered. That goes beyond negligence and points to extremely lax conduct by voter registrars allowing such shenanigans.
PILF repeatedly alerted Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to the problem, but Benson has not acted to remove the names. Without addressing the specifics cited by PILF — which in some cases include actual, side-by-side presentations of voter rolls with photos of gravestones of the still-registered voters — Benson put out this statement: “Michigan maintains its voter registration list in accordance with all state and federal laws, including provisions for deceased voters. As we’ve seen throughout the past year, meritless lawsuits serve as press releases for those seeking to further election misinformation and undermine American democracy.”
Nice dodge.
But wait, the situation is even worse. While this next bit of information is not part of last week’s lawsuit, it does suggest direct fraud is involved at some level. PILF Media Affairs Director Lauren Bowman says PILF is in the process of compiling a list of times when ballots were cast in the name of dead registrants. She said PILF already has some definite examples, which will be released once the investigation is complete.
Michigan’s sloppiness is both unconscionable and illegal. As the PILF lawsuit notes, citing federal law, “Having a process in place that systematically removes deceased registrants is not just a good idea, it is the law.”
The establishment media repeatedly insist, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, that “voter fraud isn’t a problem.” They also insist, this time without much evidence, that “voter suppression” is rampant. Yet when lawsuits such as this emerge, they receive little attention from the same media that demand examples any time they hear claims of significant irregularities in voting practices. Having demanded examples, the media turn into the “see no evil” monkey, covering their eyes when they arise.
When Theresa Domasiewicz, who was born 108 years ago and died in 2000, remains on the Michigan eligible voter lists, you know something is clearly wrong. For the Michigan secretary of state and compliant media not to acknowledge the problem is a mark of deep and unforgivable dishonesty.
