Disputed data, familiar claims: Michigan officials push back on 2024 election doubts

As Michigan prepares for what’s sure to be a contentious midterm election cycle, experts are warning that skepticism of election results becoming a bipartisan interest could have damaging consequences for the state of American democracy.

It comes as the Election Truth Alliance, a nonpartisan group led by three volunteer researchers and data analysts, released a report examining and casting doubt on the results of the 2024 election in Wayne County.

According to the report, voting data in most of Wayne County follows a trend also seen in other swing states: Precincts with higher turnout also saw Republicans win a higher vote share.

“It almost seemed systematic, meaning it didn’t look like what you would expect a little bit more of the chaotic human voting behavior to look like,” Executive Director of Advocacy and Public Engagement Nathan Taylor said. “It looked almost like an algorithm, or almost like computer generated results for the data.”

Taylor said the trend could be the result of vote stuffing or vote switching.

“If there was a successful compromise of some of the voting infrastructure, that would allow you to potentially go in and make changes to the voting data in a behavior like what we’re seeing,” Taylor said. “Algorithmic, taking votes from one candidate, giving them to the other, deleting votes or even adding in votes.”

But he said voting patterns in Detroit, the largest city in Wayne County, didn’t exhibit what he called statistical election red flags.

Election officials, scholars say analysis lacks understanding of voter behavior

Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist said the outcome of the 2024 election is unsurprising if you factor in socioeconomic factors that he said the ETA report largely ignores.

Namely, he said Democratic turnout was muted because of voter frustration with President Joe Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza. Wayne County, outside of Detroit, has the largest concentration of Arab American voters in the country, Siegrist said.

“What’s problematic about this report is it doesn’t factor in anything we know about human beings,” Siegrist said. “It’s going from A to Z, without understanding B through Y.”

Siegrist said Arab American voters and young voters were both more likely to vote in person, while older voters, who may be more partisan and committed to a particular candidate, were more likely to vote absentee.

He believes the report falls apart because it tries to use objective statistical analysis to explain subjective human behavior.

“I’ve seen these things before where people who maybe are a little too smart for their own good kind of work themselves up into using statistical analysis models that work for, like, mass production of grommets … that don’t make sense when you’re dealing with actual voters who behave based on social cues and political cues,” Siegrist said.

He said the report reminded him of unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election made by President Donald Trump and his Republican supporters.

Stanford political science professor Justin Grimmer said a heat map in the ETA’s report that shows the correlation between voter turnout and support for a candidate is almost identical to charts that were made after the 2020 election.

“That exact heat map, people produced for the 2020 election to allege that something was amiss – and, of all places, also in Wayne County, but obviously in the other direction,” Grimmer said.

He said the analyses of voting data in both elections closely mirror one another.

“Even though it’s people from two different sides of the aisle making these allegations, what’s remarkable is the similarity in the types of claims, based on aggregate vote returns or other poorly applied statistical analyses,” Grimmer said. “They reach the conclusion that something is amiss, when it’s not really supported by the analysis.”

A more credible report, Grimmer said, would begin by laying out standards that had previously been successful at identifying voter fraud and then testing the data against those standards.

Instead, he said the report appears to be looking for evidence to support a predetermined conclusion.

“It’s motivated by this baseline skepticism, and then you have these sorts of bad statistical analyses happening,” Grimmer said.

But Taylor said that’s by design. He said statistical patterns alone don’t constitute proof of fraud. Instead, the report serves as a starting point to begin investigating more closely, Taylor said.

“The types of analysis and investigations the ETA has been doing is evidential at best,” Taylor said. “It’s not proof of anything. Really the only way to absolutely know if there was a compromise of our results in the 2024 election is to actually look at the paper trail.”

Grimmer said the approach produces “foggy” claims of election manipulation that become harder to refute since baseline questions go unanswered – and unasked.

“It looks, on its face, to be rigorous, and, as a result, because this apparent rigor aligns with the skepticism that somebody else may have – it’s very hard to lose an election – they then use this to say this is evidence that something untoward happened, when it’s definitely not,” Grimmer said.

Officials warn bipartisan election skepticism could erode democratic trust

State and local officials in Michigan are already engaged in scenario planning exercises to prepare for potential challenges to the 2026 election.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said part of the planning includes meeting with faith leaders, business leaders and sports leaders who can help increase voter confidence in election results.

“This is not just actual attacks on, and trying to dismantle, the processes themselves,” Benson said. “There’s an overarching effort as well to dismantle people’s faith in our voting process and in our elections.”

Taylor said the ETA hopes to pursue “targeted investigations” in collaboration with public officials and plans to examine the results of additional counties in Michigan.

The group is especially interested in learning more about how Detroit administers elections differently than the rest of Wayne County that could explain the different statistical outcomes the group observed, he said.

But Siegrist said there’s one issue: Detroit’s elections are run on the same machines as the rest of the county.

“It’s a lot easier to say Elon Musk or some nefarious boogeyman was able to – somehow, without any real method – infiltrate air gaps, programs, machines, so that it only occurred out county, even though the programming for Wayne County is done by the county itself, so the same people who are programming Detroit are programming the rest of Wayne County,” Siegrist said.

Taylor said the group has faced a similarly cold reception from other election officials they’ve been in contact with.

“The response we’re getting is, pretty much from all officials, independent of party, independent of anything, they say, ‘Well, our elections are free and fair, safe and secure, and you bringing up these concerns just jeopardizes people’s want to vote again.’ And I think that’s incorrect,” Taylor said. “I think the problem is we are told by our officials that our elections are immune to all forms of tampering, but the data and the other information and findings and evidence doesn’t really support that there’s nothing going on, or that there’s nothing to look at.”

Grimmer said that without specific questions to test, goal posts can be moved if the requested audits don’t return the predicted or desired results.

“What would be most useful from these folks is if they clearly articulated the kind of fraud that they think is happening, and then said, ‘The way in which we would be convinced that it is not happening is to run the following test and to obtain the following results, and if that happens, we’ll go home, we’ll be done, and we’ll tell everyone that we were mistaken,’” Grimmer said. “In the absence of that, though, there’s a real risk of states adopting new procedures, those procedures not shaking out how these groups want, and, as a result, nothing changes.”

While many states already conduct audits of election results, Taylor said they don’t go far enough.

If voting machines were compromised, he said, auditing only a sample of the ballots may not be enough to catch an error.

“We’re only hand counting a small percentage of the votes and comparing them to the digital reports. And if you could compromise the digital reporting system, it may not be caught,” Taylor said. “If you are able to mess with the machines remotely, then everyone can just do their jobs, and do everything by the book, and it may not be enough to catch this.”

After four years of responding to claims of election manipulation from Republicans, Siegrist said he is concerned about some Democratic voters adopting similar rhetoric.

“It was helpful, from 2020 to 2024, that the left would be there to protect the integrity of the election system, and it is very discouraging if their motives were only because they had gotten the outcome that they wanted,” Siegrist said. “American democracy is on life support.” 

While they have differing perspectives on the validity of the methods used by the ETA, Taylor, Siegrist and Grimmer all agree on one major distinction between the claims made about the 2024 election and those made in 2020: The most recent claims are not being made by the incumbent president and losing candidate.

“We’re not pretty much top down saying our elections are being cheated and certain people are winning,” Taylor said.

Siegrist said former Vice President Kamala Harris, “for whatever failings she may have as a candidate or a person, at least has an undying commitment to democratic institutions and values, whether or not base voters on the internet have abandoned those.”

While frustrating to some Democratic voters who want Harris to call for recounts and investigations into election results, Siegrist said Harris understands that the results in both 2020 and 2024 were reflective of voter preferences.

“Anything other than that is pure Brothers Grimm fantasy. It’s folktales,” Siegrist said. “It might feel good, but it’s not good strategy politically to lie to yourself and say that you didn’t lose on the merits, because you’re doomed to repeat the same mistake.”

Grimmer said that difference, compared to Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, significantly reduces the threat posed by claims of election fraud. But he said it doesn’t completely eliminate future risk.

Republicans defending Trump’s disproven claims of voter fraud in 2020 were able to point to Democrats questioning the results of Trump’s 2016 victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Grimmer said.

Similarly, as Trump muses to Reuters that the United States “shouldn’t even have an election” in 2026 because “when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms” and tells The New York Times that he “should have” ordered the National Guard to seize voting machines in 2020, Grimmer said Trump may be able to point to claims made about the 2024 election by groups like the ETA should the president dispute the results of the midterms.

“If both parties start to say, every time they lose, it’s because of some sort of manipulation to the electoral process, the concern will be that neither side will recognize election results as legitimate, which would totally undermine our entire basis for democratic representation,” Grimmer said.

“The idea is that the people who the public wants, get to go into office, and they make decisions, and then if the public doesn’t like those decisions, they can replace them,” Grimmer said. “If that’s undermined, then it’s very difficult to believe in our system, to believe that democracy is working in America.”