There has been much public discussion about the counting of absentee ballots in Detroit. I was in the room where it happened, and thought I should record exactly what happened in the room.
Normally, it’s boring to be an election challenger for absentee ballots. But 2020 is not normal. I was an election challenger at TCF Center for Detroit’s Absent Voter Counting Board (AVCB), where I witnessed no serious issues with the election, but rampant misconduct, harassment and abuse by Republican challengers.
I was the team leader for the Democratic challengers. Our people had been trained and knew their instructions: Follow the rules, including the rule against any phones; wear your mask; point out errors in process and get them corrected; defend the process when it is right. We had no idea what was coming.
Here is what you should know about the events at TCF Center:
• Most Republican challengers and their leaders aggressively and systematically violated the laws and rules that govern challengers. They aggressively harassed election workers and obstructed their work in an effort to disrupt and slow the count.
• Contrary to the claims being made now, Republican challengers were allowed into the counting room in very large numbers and had full access and opportunity to observe.
• Contrary to the claims being made now, Republican challengers were allowed into the counting room in very large numbers and had full access and opportunity to observe.
• Contrary to the claims being made now, Republican challengers were allowed into the counting room in very large numbers and had full access and opportunity to observe.
• Contrary to the claims being made now, Republican challengers were allowed into the counting room in very large numbers and had full access and opportunity to observe.
• Contrary to the claims being made now, Republican challengers were allowed into the counting room in very large numbers and had full access and opportunity to observe.
1. Misconduct by Republican CHallengers and Their Leadership.
The Republican misconduct began on Monday, almost as soon as the election workers began to pre-process absentee ballots by opening the envelopes. Whenever the envelope contained a ballot that wasn’t in a secrecy sleeve, a challenger from the Republican Party or its ally, the “Election Integrity Fund” said that they “challenged” the ballot. But voters in Michigan are not required to use secrecy sleeves, and these ballots were perfectly legitimate. The Republican challengers (who worked together as one team, and who I’ll refer to together as “Republican challengers) challenged them anyway, violating the Michigan statute (MCL 168.727) that prohibits making challenges “indiscriminately” or “without good cause.”
The conduct of the Republican challengers followed this pattern throughout the counting. They were not looking to see whether there was fraud. They had already decided that there was fraud and other terrible deeds by the elections inspectors, and were bound and determined to find it, even if they had to make it up, as the following accounts illustrate.
Misconduct by the Republican challengers continued on Tuesday and accelerated through the counting process. Tim Griffin, a lawyer with the Thomas Moore Society and one of the leaders of the Republican effort at TCF, presented himself as a challenger for the Election Integrity Fund. But Michigan law clearly says that challengers must be registered to vote in Michigan. Mr. Griffin is pretty well known, and when his lack of qualifications was pointed out to elections officials, they asked him to leave the counting area. They did allow him to be a “poll watcher,” which meant that he had to stay in a small area at the front of the room, where the press was allowed.
On Election Day, while the polls were open, a steady stream of Republican challengers went to the talk with Mr. Griffin in the poll watcher area and return to the room. Then Mr. Griffin took out his phone and made a call.
Phones and recording devices are strictly prohibited anywhere in the room while the polls are open. It’s against the law to communicate anything about the counting to anyone outside the room. Anyone with a phone can be ejected.
When election officials observed Mr. Griffin’s phone, they did not eject him. They did not confiscate the phone. They told him to stop using it. A while later, Mr. Griffin used his phone in the bathroom. Election officials again told him to stop. The man was obviously illegally coordinating the Republican efforts with people outside the room.
Our team was instructed to leave our phones in our cars while the polls were open. I left my phone in my car, and I am confident that the other Democratic challengers did the same. But many Republican challengers were caught using phones while the polls were open. We saw six of them, and all received warnings from elections officials but were allowed to stay.
At one point I mentioned to one of the senior elections officials that there were a lot of Republicans using their phones, and that I would certainly have liked to have the same ability to communicate with the Democratic lawyers and with others. The official smiled and thanked me for following the rules. In this and many other cases the election officials bent over backwards to let Republicans have access, even though they were flagrantly violating the law and subject to ejection.
Phones were allowed after the polls closed Tuesday evening, but filming and recording were not. More than a few Republican challengers were caught filming. The elections officials did not confiscate phones, and in most cases gave warnings. One Republican challenger who was a repeat offender was escorted from the room by the Detroit police. The Republicans knew this rule and flouted it intentionally and repeatedly.
* * *
There were 134 teams of election inspectors in the room, each working at a “Counting Board” set up on four large folding tables. The inspectors checked in ballots against the poll book – an electronic record of voters who had been issued absentee ballots – on laptops, while a large monitor displayed exactly what was on the laptop screen. Many Republican challengers began challenging every ballot, and demanding that the election inspectors stop and write down the challenge.
Under the law, there is only one valid basis for challenging a ballot: that the challenger has a good reason to believe that the voter is not eligible to vote. Our team did not hear any challenger articulate such a basis. The challenges were nothing more than an attempt to slow down the process and harass the workers. Our team repeatedly pointed out that the challenges were invalid and that the inspectors could continue their work. This was repeatedly confirmed by supervisors, by their supervisors, and by the senior elections officials in the room.
Challengers are also allowed to challenge a failure to follow correct procedures. And challengers from both parties did occasionally notice minor errors, point them out to a supervisor, and see them corrected immediately. No challenger who calmly and politely pointed out a possible error was rebuffed, even when it turned out (as it often did) that the challenger was mistaken. This is the proper role of a challenger, to help assure that any mistakes are caught and corrected early in the process. Unfortunately, our Republican counterparts collectively spent little of their time on this role and much time and much time and energy on disrupting the count and harassing the election inspectors.
A process challenge doesn’t make a vote invalid. Consider this example: You are at your polling place to vote on Election Day and are about to submit your ballot, but an election worker grabs the ballot and shows it to the people in the room. The election worker has violated the law, and a challenger would be entitled to submit a process challenge. But the challenger would not be entitled to say that your vote should not be counted because of the election worker’s wrongdoing. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit put it, it is “a proposition indisputable in our democratic process: that the lawfully cast vote of every citizen must count.” You don’t lose your vote because an election worker makes a process mistake.
Republican challengers repeatedly tried to stop the work at Counting Boards to interrogate each inspector about his or her party affiliation, claiming that there has to be a Republican inspector at each counting Board. Many of them were very aggressive, often starting off the conversation by yelling at the inspectors. There is no requirement for inspectors of each party at the Counting Boards, and the Republican leaders surely knew it. Supervisors repeatedly had to intervene to stop these improper challenges and the hostile and aggressive conduct of Republican challengers.
Many Republican challengers were rude, and far worse, to election inspectors. They pressed in close and yelled accusations. They demanded that inspectors interrupt their work to respond to irrelevant or personal questions. Some came face to face with election inspectors and removed their masks. They were intentionally intimidating and abusive; we could see the fear on election workers’ faces, and saw more than one reduced to tears. The image of a 98% white group of challengers was verbally assaulting a 92% Black group of election workers was searing.
Scores of challengers would keep repeating the same invalid procedural challenges across the room for hours. The senior election officials would explain the law; sometimes Republican leaders would advise their challengers to tone it down, or even move them to another location in the room. But the same challenges, hostility, and aggression would be repeated, again and again. These were not ever good faith challenges. They were a blatant attempt to disrupt the process.
At one point a large group of Republican challengers huddled with some of their leaders. One of these leaders shouted, loud enough for several of our volunteers to hear, “You’ve got to be more aggressive.” From that point onward, the shouting, the abuse and the disruption increased.
Republican challengers often tried to stop the work at the tables to ask the election inspectors to explain the work they were doing. Challengers have rights, but these do not include interrupting the counting to receive lessons on the election laws. It is the responsibility of the sponsoring organization, not the election inspectors, to train challengers so that they can do their job. This was clearly an intentional effort on the part of the Republican leadership to disrupt and slow down the counting.
At one point a Republican challenger was aggressively asking an election supervisor questions about the Secretary of State mailing absentee ballots, which of course never happened. The Secretary of State mailed applications for absentee ballots, not ballots. In any case these election inspectors had nothing to do with the mailing, and the question had nothing to do with their work. I joined the conversation to correct his facts and to tell the Republican challenger that he was interfering with the work of the inspectors by raising issues unrelated to absentee ballot processing.
Some of the Republican challengers were pretty tough. One of them told me that he knows who I am, and that “we will be coming after you.” This was just one of the threats made to our challengers during the day. One Republican challenger asked one of my colleagues, “do you want to get hurt?” It took the head of security and a Detroit Police captain to talk him down.
In short, many Republican challengers behaved as if they were at a raucous street protest, not at an important governmental function where they had a legitimate role to play.
There were some serious Republican challengers who tried to do their work in the right way. My colleagues and I spoke with several of them. They all affirmed that they had seen no serious problems and that the errors they had seen were promptly corrected by elections officials. One gentleman, watching the behavior of his colleagues, expressed his disappointment to me (knowing that I was the team leader for the Democrats). “I don’t understand this,” he said.”
It was early Thursday morning before all the ballots were counted and the election inspectors could begin their closing procedures. After the counting, the inspectors are required to reconcile the number of ballots checked in at the very beginning of the process against the number of ballots counted. This is one of several safeguards in the system designed to find errors and fraud.
Before the balancing started, I gathered our team. We reviewed the closing checklist that was to be followed and our training, and emphasized the key things to watch. The Republican challengers watching the balancing process did not appear to have been trained.
The inspectors worked hard and conscientiously –- I watched one team carefully hand count over 1,800 ballots to run down a discrepancy of nine votes.
After the closing was finished and all of the ballot boxes were sealed, a handful of Republican challengers stayed to watch the staff load the boxes into the truck that would take them to the next step in the process. There was nothing to see, but I stayed with a small group of our volunteers, just in case anyone was tempted to make up stories. I asked one young Republican challenger, who said he was a lawyer, what he was watching for. He wasn’t sure.
A little after 6:00 Thursday morning, the truck drove off. The Republicans seemed reluctant to leave, but the police officers on hand finally told us all that the work was done, the room was closing, and we all had to go.
2. Republican Challengers Had Full Access.
Republicans (and the president) have argued that their challengers were denied access to the room, that they weren’t allowed enough challengers, and that they couldn’t see what was happening. This is simply false.
Each accrediting organization was allowed 134 challengers, and the Republicans were coordinating with “Election Integrity Fund,” so they were allowed twice that number. As counting started on Tuesday, they had at least twice as many challengers as the Democrats – we had fewer than 90 challengers in the room.
After the polls closed Tuesday night, at least fifty additional Republican challengers arrived and were admitted to the counting room. They had plenty of people.
The Republican challengers had full access to see what was going on. The elections inspectors were accommodating until, and often after, Republicans became unreasonable and abusive. When Republican challengers asked politely for a better vantage point that did not interfere with the process, they were accommodated.
Republican challengers would often approach a table and lean in very close to the election inspectors, violating the COVID guidelines. In at least one case, the Republican challenger complained that she couldn’t see, but nothing was happening at the table and there was nothing to see. When she was asked what she was trying to see, she had no answer. They had a script – complain that you can’t see. They repeated it constantly, whether or not they could really see, and whether or not there was anything to see.
When Republican challengers were politely asked to step back, they would complain vociferously, usually yelling loudly at the election workers, and a group of Republican challengers would rush over to the table to add to the tumult. Our challengers could see what was going on, and I don’t believe that Republicans as a group have significantly worse vision than Democrats. The complaints were obviously designed to intimidate and disrupt – nothing was hidden.
The high-speed tabulators have impressive technology for scanning ballots and counting votes, but some ballots can’t be scanned. When this happens, the ballot is returned to the individual Counting Board to be duplicated. (Military ballots arrive in a form that can’t be scanned, and all military ballots had to be duplicated. And there seemed to be a software problem with the tabulators that caused them to reject some ballots that should have been scannable.)
The duplication is conducted by three inspectors: one reads off the votes from the original ballot, while a second records those votes on the duplicate, and a third watches to assure accuracy. Challengers are, of course, permitted to watch and confirm the accuracy of the duplication. The original ballot is put into a special envelope to be accounted for at the end of the night, and the duplicated ballot goes to the tabulator to be counted.
Challengers were asked to stay well back from the election inspectors to reduce the risk of transmission of coronavirus. This meant we all had to be a little creative to see the duplication. It wasn’t hard to find a spot from which to watch. In many cases, the inspectors showed both the original and duplicate to the challengers after they were finished so that there was full opportunity to confirm that the ballot had been copied correctly. At each table, one Republican, one Democrat and one challenger from another group (like EIF) was permitted to observe, and other challengers were asked to step back.
The Republicans’ approach to the military ballots revealed their real approach. Before the military ballots were brought into the room, Republican challengers were loudly demanding to know what had happened to them, accusing elections inspectors of discarding ballots that the Republicans were sure would be overwhelmingly for their candidate. Once the ballots arrived, Republicans watching the duplication process saw that most were voted for the other candidate. Then they started howling about fraud. (Note that they could see the ballots well enough to know how they were voted.) There is no fraud, just the mistaken assumption by the Republicans that service members from Detroit would vote very differently from other Detroiters.
Many Republican challengers, however, began yelling immediately if they were not allowed to stand in precisely the spot they wanted. They screamed accusations at the elections inspectors, and at supervisors who came to find a solution. They demanded that two, or often more, Republicans be permitted to crowd around the table, even though this only made it harder to see what was going on. They were abusive to the election workers and to our volunteers.
When the tabulators that “read” the ballots and count the votes encountered a ballot that they could not process automatically, an image of the ballot was displayed on a screen at one of twelve “adjudication stations.” At these computers, election inspectors team up in pairs of a Republican and a Democrat to record write-in votes and interpret any ballots that the scanner can’t, all according to an established set of rules. (This is the one place where inspectors from both parties are required.) They record write-in votes. If a voter hasn’t completely filled in the oval by a candidate’s name, they decide whether the mark is a vote or a stray mark. (If a voter marks the ballot for a regular candidate and also writes in a name that can’t be a real candidate, like Mickey Mouse, the rule says that the regular candidate gets the vote. So the Detroit citizen who voted for Donald Trump for President AND wrote in Jesus Christ for President had his vote counted for Trump.)
It wasn’t always easy to stay back and see what was going on, but both Republican and Democratic challengers were permitted to step in momentarily when we wanted a better look. At one point, the supervisor of the adjudication section ran out of Republican inspectors and bent the rules to allow Republican challengers to actually do the work so that the counting could continue.
On Republican challenger spent a long time at one adjudication station, watching intently. At one point, several of his colleagues ran up to him to ask what he had found. “There hasn’t been a single decision I’ve disagreed with,” he said.
3. Most Republican Challengers Had No Real Training.
As this account makes clear, many of the Republican challengers did not betray any knowledge of the laws and rules that control an AVCB. As best I can tell, for most of them this was not an act – they actually did not know. They came into the room having been told that they would find terrible fraud everywhere. For example, they were sure that the election inspectors would run ballots through the tabulators multiple times. They watched for the fraud they had been told about and, when they didn’t see it, were convinced that it was being hidden from them.
Senior elections officials explained the law and the process to Republican challengers, over and over again.
Among the basic laws and facts that Republican challengers didn’t know, in addition to those noted above like the imaginary rule that ballots that arrived without a secrecy sleeve are invalid, are:
• Many Republican challengers complained vociferously that voters’ signatures were not being checked against the State’s Qualified Voter File. But under the law signatures not checked at the AVCB; they had previously been checked at the Detroit Board of Elections.
• Republican challengers did not know that the election inspectors in the AVCB did not have access to Qualified Voter File. They did not know that the electronic list on the computer screens was an Electronic Poll Book that was created based on absentee ballots received by Sunday, November 1, and that had to be updated for the absentee ballots received on Monday and Tuesday.
• Some Republican challengers believed that there was a legal requirement that absentee ballots be recorded in the QVF by 9:00 pm on Election Day. There is no such rule.
• At least one challenger complained that the name on the ballot should have been compared with the name in the Electronic Poll Book. Of course there are no names on ballots anywhere in the United States. It’s beyond ludicrous. And Republican lawyers took this charge seriously enough that they included it in their Wayne lawsuit against the City.
• Many Republican challengers did not understand the duplication process for ballots that could not be read by the tabulators.
• Many Republican challengers did not know that, under the law, birth dates are not used for verification at AVCBs. (The software for Electronic Poll Books requires that the field for birth date be completed, because the Electronic Poll Books are also used in polling places.) So, when these challengers saw election inspectors following the established practice of entering January 1, 1900 when it was missing, wh• ich is done so that the file is flagged to be updated after the election, they complained. Election official Chris Thomas repeatedly explained the rules and the process to groups of Republican challengers. Yet this complaint still made it into the lawsuit in Wayne County.
One young man spotted an election inspector returning from the tabulators to his table carrying a box used for ballots. He loudly accused the man of bringing ballots back to the table to be processed again! A small crowd of Republican challengers gathered. The election inspector looked at these very excited people and slowly opened his box for them to see. It was empty. He was bringing the empty box back to the table to be filled with the next batch of ballots.
One Republican challenger complained in an affidavit in the Wayne County litigation that we Democrats did not wear credentials that identified us, and that many Democratic challengers had only a small green dot affixed to their clothing. What this person did not understand was that the elections officials had reminded both Democratic and Republican leadership, well in advance of Election Day that challengers are not allowed to wear any partisan identification. This is not a new rule, and applies to polling places as well.
The Democrats followed this rule; the Republicans evidently decided to ignore it. We gave our challengers small green stickers so that we could identify one another. The election officials, as usual trying to avoid confrontation in the face of misconduct by the Republicans, did not do anything to enforce the rule.
The Michigan Democratic Party’s Voter Protection Program put together a fairly intense 90-minute training program specifically for challengers in AVCBs. I have many ideas for improvement, but our team had at least a decent understanding of the basics.
Most Republican challengers did not. Many of the lawyers on their team did not. They didn’t know the law or the rules. They often didn’t accept the rules, even after senior elections officials explained them.
It is clear to me that this was intentional, to encourage the Republican challengers to repeatedly make challenges that had no basis in the law.
4. The Republican Program Was Not Designed to Find Real Fraud.
If an intelligent person was really convinced that there would be fraud at an AVCB, and really determined to find it, that person would design a program very different from that the Republicans designed and executed. Anyone who has been involved in a forensic audit can tell you that it is exacting and tedious work. One has to understand potential signs of fraud and watch intently.
A serious effort would have deployed a team a trained challengers, who knew how AVCBs work, knew the law and the correct procedures, and organized themselves to watch quietly and effectively for slip-ups that would betray cheating. A serious effort would have had a trained and dedicated teams to watch the adjudication, duplication and balancing processes. A serious effort would not have allowed the team to be distracted by repeating obviously invalid challenges. A serious effort would not have involved yelling, screaming, intimidation and threats.
In a serious effort, challengers who couldn’t see what was going on would not have thrown tantrums worthy of spoiled four-year-olds; they would have had a colleague get a supervisor or elections official to verify and correct the situation.
They worked hard to disrupt and slow down the counting so that they could complain about how long it had taken. They made up rules that don’t exist and that every competent elections lawyer knows don’t exist. They substituted harassment and yelling for careful observation and reporting of issues.
When all is said and done, the Republican effort was not designed to find fraud. It was designed to create events that could be distorted and made to look like fraud on TV.
5. The Process Was Not Perfect, But it Was Basically Sound.
It is pretty well known that the Detroit City Clerk’s office has had problems with election administration, including at the AVCB during the August primary. These problems were one reason why the City Clerk engaged Chris Thomas as a consultant to help with this election, and especially with the absentee ballots. Mr. Thomas was the Director of Elections for the State of Michigan for over three decades, working mainly for Republican Secretaries of State.
Mr. Thomas helped make the count go much better in November than it had in August. Two Republican challengers who had been in the same room with me in August agreed.
But of course the process didn’t work perfectly. Our team witnessed errors by election inspectors, which were corrected after we called them to the attention of supervisors. We saw Republican challengers have the same positive experience when they followed procedures. The team leaders and elections officials knew the rules, corrected errors, and conducted retraining on the spot when necessary.
During the counting I spoke with two challengers who are process engineers – one Republican and one Democrat. They both said that the process was inefficient and that they could improve it. They both had ideas. But neither thought that the process was broken in a way that would lead to errors in the counting of votes. I agree.
6. There Was No Fraud.
There was no fraud in the counting of absentee ballots. There were no mistakes that could affect the outcome of the election. The count was fundamentally fair.
The only frauds committed in connection with Detroit’s AVCB are the false Republican claims of fraud. The Republicans in the room were trying to create a public relations event by causing chaos, harassing and intimidating election workers, and falsifying what happened.
The lawsuits filed by Republican lawyers, and the public statements of Republican Party and elected officials that claim fraud, or even take the claims of fraud seriously, are nonsense. They are bad faith efforts to undermine Michigan election law, the election system in Michigan, and this election.
David, Thank you ever so much for your work… and for your rather riveting tale of the AVCB.