Fervent for Trump, not giving up the fight
The everyday Americans challenging his defeat
Alexandra Seely, 27, a dental hygienist, had never been in court except to deal with a traffic ticket. Yet days after the presidential election, her name was near the top of a lawsuit alleging widespread vote fraud in Michigan – a lawsuit designed to alter the result of a presidential election.
In a handwritten affidavit, and during a subsequent interview with USA TODAY, Seely described what she saw as she monitored vote counting in Detroit as a Republican challenger.
Seely said she’s convinced not just that there was vote fraud there but that an entire election was stolen – despite conclusions to the contrary by judges, intelligence officials, President Donald Trump's attorney general, independent observers and election supervisors in states red and blue.
That Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 4, election workers in a cavernous room at the TCF Center unloaded absentee
ballots and fed them into machines. As more ballots were counted, Trump’s lead in Michigan shrank. Things were getting tense.
Seely monitored the count at Table 23. Ballots were brought out in nylon roller bags. A worker would pull one out and scan it, announcing the voter’s name and ballot number. When things matched, the ballot would go into a stack to be tallied.
Seely said she challenged about 10 votes, raising her hand when something “wasn’t right.” One person appeared to have voted twice, she said. At least five ballots wouldn’t scan.
Challenged ballots were supposed to be set aside, Seely said, but inspectors took them away and refused to register her objections on a log, claiming they took note on a computer.
In the days after the election, Trump’s allies and attorneys mobilized to stop the counting, delay certification of the results and challenge the legitimacy of ballots. Seely and others provided statements about what they saw, heard and suspected.
In Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia – all swing states – they swore they witnessed poll workers filling out blank ballots, changing votes, processing and backdating flawed ballots, delivering suspicious trunks to counting rooms and blocking, ignoring or intimidating GOP monitors.
Many of those allegations crumbled under scrutiny. Their beliefs have not.
'A bunch of stuff going on'
Those who submitted statements under penalty of perjury reflect a crosssection of America: blue- and whitecollar workers, homemakers, retirees, students, military personnel.
Jeffrey Gorman, 65, a retired airline pilot from Garden City, Michigan, said he raced to serve as a challenger in the TCF Center in Detroit after getting an email from Republican friends.
“They said there was a bunch of stuff going on,” he said, “and all of a sudden, these votes showed up in the middle of the night.”
The Trump campaign and its allies have lost 40 lawsuits and won one that affected a few dozen votes, according to a running tally by Marc Elias, a Democratic elections expert.
In the days after the election, false narratives, rumors and claims about suspicious events echoed through an insular world of right-wing websites, news outlets and social media influencers. Among them were a few examples of actual wrongdoing or human error – a “stitching together of real, isolated incidents,” as Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, described it.
Miami attorney Ibrahim Reyes, a Republican, said he drove 660 miles to Atlanta because he felt compelled to see the Georgia recount in person – and to prevent fraudulent ballots from being counted.
“Many people do what’s easier, which is perhaps to post a comment on social media,” Reyes said. “But that doesn’t help. We actually have to take action and get involved as American citizens.”
Leading up to Election Day, Trump’s campaign called for an “army” to watch over the voting. These were the foot soldiers.
Recruited to challenge ballots
Andrew Sitto, 26, a college student from West Bloomfield, Michigan, couldn’t believe the chaos as he entered the TCF Center as a Republican challenger on Election Night.
“The room was jam-packed,” he said. “It looked like the stock exchange on the very worst day.”
Sitto, the son of Iraqi immigrants, described himself as a staunch Trump supporter, in part because of the president’s focus on Iraq.
As the election neared, Sitto said, he got on a GOP email list and was recruited to do door-knocking for Trump. Later he got a message asking if he’d serve as a challenger.
He was assigned to watch workers process military absentee votes. Around 4:30 a.m., he said, a buddy noticed a van unloading at the dock. Sitto said he watched as ballots were removed from boxes. Later, Sitto said, he saw workers filling out blank ballots.
He said he tried to raise challenges, but he was ignored.
Many military personnel cast their votes by mail with a Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot that cannot be tabulated by voting machines. Their votes are transferred by hand onto standard, blank ballots by election employees working in pairs, one from each party, according to a court filing.
In a court response to allegations that challenges were ignored, defendants said legitimate objections were registered, but election workers did not record "the numerous frivolous and legally invalid challenges."
Sitto said in his afffidavit, “I specifically noticed that every ballot I observed was for Biden,” referring to Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
He told USA TODAY he is convinced Trump lost because of widespread fraud: “If you were to put me on the stand, I would say yes.”
The Trump campaign and allies provided more than 100 affidavits to support their allegations of election fraud and abuse in Michigan. The city of Detroit responded with an affidavit from Christopher Thomas, a former head of elections for Michigan.
Thomas painstakingly addressed the allegations in one suit, concluding Republican challengers “do not understand absent voter ballot processing and tabulating.”
The judge agreed, writing that challengers' concerns could have been addressed if they had attended a walkthrough of the TCF Center. “Regrettably, they did not,” the judge wrote. “Plaintiffs' interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.”
A call to arms
Early in the morning on Nov. 4, the Livingston County Republican Party posted on Facebook that poll watchers were needed at the TCF Center, about an hour away: “35,000 ballots were suddenly found at 3:00 am in Detroit. We need YOU to help us defend the vote and help President Trump.”
The state Republican Party and conservative activists put out similar calls.
Seely had stayed up late on Election Night, growing ebullient as she watched the returns on a Fox News app. When she awoke, certain victory seemed to be slipping away.
“I thought, this is so weird. Something’s not right,” Seely recalled. “This is why people feel like their votes don’t matter.”
Ballots counted Tuesday night were mostly cast in person. It took longer to count the huge increase in mail and absentee ballots, which in many states went overwhelmingly for Biden.
Seely's dad, director of the Trump campaign in Wayne County, called at 9 a.m. Wednesday to ask if she would help monitor counting of mail-in votes.
'Stop the count!'
After a short training session provided by the Trump campaign, Seely entered the “gi-normous” hall where the ballots were being counted. The room contained 134 tables, each staffed by five vote counters, under the watch of several hundred Democratic, Republican and independent challengers.
Seely’s suspicions grew as the day progressed. She alleged votes were counted even when names and ballot numbers didn’t match, or when tabulation machines detected errors.
Throughout the hall, Republican challengers escalated their complaints against election workers.
Police escorted some monitors out of the hall. Those outside began banging on the windows, chanting, “Stop the count!” Election staffers taped cardboard over the glass to keep people from taking photos and videos.
Someone shot a video of the windows being covered. It was picked up on social media by Trump and his press secretary.
In response to the Trump lawsuits in Michigan, lawyers for the Democrat Party submitted affidavits describing a starkly different narrative than Republicans’. Joseph Zimmerman, a law student who served as an independent challenger at the TCF Center, said GOP challengers were “aggressive and intimidating,” sometimes surrounding vote counters and badgering them.
Around 2 p.m., word spread via social media that the Trump campaign had filed a lawsuit to block the counting in Wayne County. (The suit had not yet been filed.)
Zimmerman said Republicans inside the hall started challenging every vote based on “pending litigation.” One of them began to shout, “Stop the count!” and those outside the room picked up the chorus.
Like Sitto, Seely said she believes there was fraud in Wayne County’s vote count, and the presidential outcome was stolen.
Seely said she heard about an incident in Shiawassee County in which every vote tallied during one batch was for Biden. The culprit, it turned out, was a typographical error in which an extra zero was added to Biden's total.
Trump amplified that claim, tweeting, “WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?”
The notion that the election was “rigged” – and the desire to combat the result – did not come out of nowhere, said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the nonpartisan Wilson Center.
“It was a narrative that was laid very carefully in the months leading up to the election,” she said.
In any U.S. election, there are going to be small-scale incidents in which something goes wrong, DiResta said. That doesn't "mean there was massive fraud," DiResta said, but it does help create "the perception that our process for voting is broken.”
“This is not a thing that only stupid people fall prey to,” she said. “People seek out information that confirms their beliefs or more heavily weight the information that confirms their beliefs.”
The Trump campaign dropped the Michigan lawsuit in which Seely was a plaintiff.
‘Pristine’ ballots in Georgia
In Georgia, attorney Lin Wood launched an effort in federal court to halt the certification of the state’s election results. The evidence: 18 affidavits from witnesses alleging fraud.
Suzi Voyles, who said she served more than two decades as a Fulton County poll manager, was one of them.
Voyles said she observed a box of 800 ballots, mostly for Biden, during the hand audit Nov. 14. The voting cards were “pristine” and “unusually uniform,” she said – which she believed was a sign they were fraudulent.
Though she’s a Republican activist, she said she was motivated to file an affidavit by her concern for election integrity.
“I felt as a citizen concerned about free and fair elections that if I did not say something, that not only challenged the integrity of my vote but every other voter in the state of Georgia,” Voyles said. “We can’t afford to have people lose faith in our voting process.”
In a Nov. 19 court filing, attorneys for Georgia’s secretary of state said allegations in the Wood lawsuit were “legally unsupportable efforts to trigger a constitutional crisis and overturn the election results.”
The Georgia lawsuit, like most of the others, failed in court.
Two and a half weeks after the election, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, certified the state’s election results after a handcount audit.
Sharpiegate in Arizona
In Goodyear, Arizona, on the outskirts of Phoenix, Clint Jamison and his wife showed up to vote on Election Day with their five kids, ages 4 months to 9 years. They stood in line wearing masks, got their IDs scanned and were handed Sharpie pens to mark their ballots.
Jamison said his wife voted without a hitch, but when he placed his ballot in the machine to be counted, it was spit out because of a stray mark in a judge’s race.
The poll worker offered three options: He could submit his ballot for a hand count, start over with a new ballot or process the flawed one, knowing his vote in that race wouldn’t be tallied.
Jamison chose the last one. He resubmitted the ballot, a worker pressed a green button on the machine, and he left.
Afterward, amid rumors of Arizona election fraud dubbed “Sharpiegate,” Jamison began to wonder whether his votes were counted.
The conspiracy theory gained traction late Nov. 3 when a Facebook user posted a video – which the site marked as “false information."A woman on camera said ballots for two voters were rejected because of blotches caused by Sharpie markers. The person recording the video said, “That way those votes aren’t counted.”
As the video spread, Trump’s campaign asked Arizona voters and poll workers to report election problems to a website called “DontTouchtheGreenButton.com.”
Election officials in Maricopa County, where many of the concerns were centered, said Sharpies are the preferred instrument for marking ballots because they don't smear.
Sharpiegate reached the highest levels of conservative social media, shared by Eric Trump and Rep. Paul Gosar, RAriz.
By Nov. 4, demonstrators were outside the Maricopa County vote tabulation center, holding signs reading, "Count every vote!”
Jamison became concerned his vote for president hadn’t been counted. When he couldn't reach election officials, he went to a Republican website, filled out a form and wound up completing an affidavit for a lawsuit.
In court papers, Trump’s lawyers sought to enter hundreds of unsigned affidavits as evidence.
Lawyers for Secretary of State Katie Hobbs responded in a brief: “These selfserving ‘declarations’ were marshalled by a political campaign that primed the pump about alleged ‘ widespread problems.’ There is no evidence that those filling out the forms even voted, let alone witnessed any errors or wrongdoing.”
A judge agreed, ruling out the unsigned affidavits.
In court, GOP lawyers offered no evidence that election errors were systemic or that Trump supporters were targeted. Witnesses acknowledged they did not know whether their presidential votes went uncounted.
‘I’m going to surmise it’
Edward Balko, 62, a self-described computer expert, claimed in an affidavit that he detected multiple irregularities when he voted in Phoenix.
In an interview, Balko said he believes the election was stolen because there is no other explanation for what he saw as Biden’s impossible comeback after Trump's initial lead.
Balko said he was given a Sharpie to mark his ballot but chose to use his own pen. A tabulation machine rejected his ballot.
The poll worker simply inserted it again and gave him an “I Voted” sticker.
He claimed there’s a pattern in fraud complaints across the country, saying he researched Maricopa County’s voting machines and concluded they were improperly linked to outside computers. National intelligence officials said there’s no evidence voting systems were compromised.
Asked for proof, he said, “I’m going to surmise it.”
Balko knows some of the things he speaks of didn’t happen. He mentioned a Michigan video that went viral on social media, purportedly showing a trunk full of ballots rolling into the TCF Center. When told the case contained video equipment, he acknowledged the fraud allegation had been debunked.
Arizona election officials pointed out that, amid more than 2 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, fewer than 200 registered an error for the presidential race. Biden defeated Trump in Arizona by about 10,500 votes.
The judge dismissed the lawsuit after a Trump campaign lawyer acknowledged that Biden won Arizona regardless of any perceived tabulation errors.
Jamison still doesn’t know whether his votes counted or whether the election was rigged. “There’s a lot of things that seem off about the numbers,” he said.
“Is it mass vote fraud?” he said. “If I had to lean, I’d say yes, it seems like it. I don’t think Biden won.”