Mich. voting machine plot points to trend
Eight months after the 2020 presidential election, Robin Hawthorne didn’t expect anyone to ask for her township’s voting machines.
The election had gone smoothly, she said, just as others had she’d overseen for 17 years as the Rutland Charter Township clerk in rural western Michigan. But now a sheriff’s deputy and investigator were in her office, questioning her about her township’s three vote tabulators, suggesting they somehow were programmed with a microchip to shift votes from former President Donald Trump to Joe Biden and asking her to hand one over for inspection.
“What the heck is going on?” she recalled thinking.
The surprise visit may have been an “out-of-the-blue thing,” as Hawthorne described it, but it was one element of a much broader effort by figures who deny the outcome of the 2020 vote to access voting machines in a bid to prove fraud.
In states across the country — including Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia — attempts to inappropriately access voting machines have spurred investigations. They have also sparked concern among election authorities that, while voting systems are broadly secure, breaches by those looking for evidence of fraud could themselves compromise the integrity of the process and undermine confidence in the vote.
In Michigan, the efforts to access the machines jumped into public view this month when the state’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, requested a special prosecutor be assigned to look into a group that includes her likely Republican opponent, Matthew DePerno.
The expected GOP nominee, Nessel’s office wrote in a petition filed Aug. 5 based on the findings of a state police investigation, was “one of the prime instigators” of a conspiracy to persuade Michigan clerks to allow unauthorized access to voting machines. Others involved, according to the filing, included a state representative and the sheriff, Dar Leaf.
Although Hawthorne rebuffed the request by investigators to examine one of her machines, a clerk in nearby Irving Township handed one over to the pair despite state and federal laws that limit who can access them. About 150 miles north of Hawthorne’s township, three clerks in two other Michigan counties turned over voting machines and other equipment to third parties, public records show.
The petition says tabulators were taken to hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, where a group of four men “broke into” the tabulators and performed “tests” on them.
DePerno has denied any wrongdoing, as has Leaf, the Barry County sheriff. DePerno’s campaign issued a statement calling the petition for a special prosecutor “an incoherent liberal fever dream of lies.”