Hello, and happy Thursday,
Last Saturday, I spent the day at Donald Trump’s rally in Washington, Michigan, a suburb about 45 minutes north of Detroit.
The former president was in Michigan to rally for Kristina Karamo and Matthew DePerno, two little-known Republican candidates running for secretary of state and attorney general respectively. Both have never held elected office and have fashioned their entire political identity by spreading misinformation about the 2020 election. If elected, both would wield considerable influence over the rules of how ballots in Michigan, a critical battleground state, are cast and counted.
For the last year, my colleague Ed Pilkington and I have been closely following how Trump and allies are trying to take over or get elected to offices that have more control over election rules (you can read Ed’s recent profile of Karamo here). In Michigan, Republicans have appointed people who have embraced the idea of a stolen election to local boards of canvassers, which certify election results. With those positions filled, and Trump loyalists like Karamo and DePerno holding statewide office, many see a clear effort to put pieces in places to block a Democrat from being declared the winner of the next presidential election.
I wanted to know whether people at the rally continued to believe the election was stolen, and whether there was anything that could convince them otherwise. More than 250 local audits have affirmed the results in Michigan. A Republican-led review by the legislature has also debunked Trump’s claims of fraud.
From the moment I got to the rally on Saturday morning, I saw the strategy of focusing on election machinery on display. Over and over, I heard many people being solicited to become election workers. That included two men I was interviewing as they waited in line.
“You guys think we’re gonna have a fair election?” a canvasser with a clipboard asked Christian Howard, 25, and Marco Braggion, 26. “We need to keep eyes on what’s going on. If we don’t have eyes on it, they’re gonna do what they want,” he said.
When both men declined to sign up – one was from out of state and the other couldn’t get time off work – the canvasser didn’t give up. He asked them if they knew anyone else who might be interested.
Another group was trying to get people to sign a petition to “decertify” the 2020 election in Michigan, something that is not possible. Inside the rally, organizers placed a petition that would tighten voting rules in the state on every single seat. It wasn’t until the end of the day that I realized that for all of the petition signing and election worker signing, I hadn’t heard anyone asking people if they wanted to sign up to register to vote.
A few people had heard of either DePerno or Karamo, but it was clear that Trump’s endorsement was elevating the two candidates. “Trump endorsed them, that got my attention. So I’m here to see that,” said Diane Zechmeister, 67, who traveled from nearby Oxford to the rally.
Nearly everyone I spoke to who believed the 2020 election was stolen said it would be nearly impossible to convince them otherwise. “Not with what I’ve seen. I really, I just can’t see that,” said Greg Taylor, 38. “The only way that we could know is, I guess, through an audit, I guess. But who knows about the audit?” he said. “It’s so hard to trust anybody. I don’t trust either side, you know.”
I asked Taylor where he gets his news from and he told me Telegram, the popular messaging app, where there are concerns about the spread of misinformation.
Wayne Wallace, 58, said he had been voting in the same precinct in Arenac county for years, but when he and his wife went to vote in 2020 there were several people he didn’t recognize. “It all seemed shady and sheisty, and now I understand how it could have happened,” he told me. “I don’t run elections. I just know bullshit when I see it.”
He also noted Trump had warned for months about vote totals changing in the middle of the night, which wound up happening in 2020. Election officials and experts had warned it would take longer than usual to count votes in 2020 because of the influx of mail-in ballots and that vote totals could change.
And he said he remained unconvinced by the multitude of audits Michigan did to affirm the election results.
“It’s not in the vote. It’s in who counted the vote,” he said.
Also worth watching …
A federal judge didn’t just strike down several new voting restrictions in Florida last week, but went even further and said the state had to pre-clear certain voting changes with his court for the next 10 years. Florida is appealing.
Trump allies are pushing to have jurisdictions count ballots by hand, something experts warn is prone to error and could be a “recipe for some chaos”.
Ohio officials are again making the case to the state supreme court for why they shouldn’t be held in contempt for ignoring previous orders to make the state’s legislative districts less distorted in favor of Republicans.
Texas rejected nearly 25,000 mail-in ballots in its 1 March primary, meaning the state had a staggeringly high 12.38% rejection rate.
Several Republican-led states have made it illegal to receive outside funding for elections, which will make it harder for local election offices to serve voters.
