Michigan sees effort to decertify 2020 election results, install Trump in White House in 2023

The right-wing effort to discredit the 2020 election results in Michigan is moving beyond demanding a so-called “forensic audit” with activists using the same debunked conspiracy theories to call for decertifying the results and forcing a constitutional crisis. 

Decertify Michigan is led by Robert Gelt, a former President Donald Trump supporter who initially sought to conduct a so-called “forensic audit” of Michigan’s election results, which showed Joe Biden beating Trump by more than 154,000 votes to win the state’s 16 electoral votes on his way to winning the White House. Despite over 250 state and local audits confirming those results, the falsehood that Trump was the winner remains a key, if not the sole, talking point for his supporters. 

Gelt has been a frequent guest and contributor to another conspiracy-laden group, Election Integrity Force and Fund, which hosted a rally last October in Lansing seeking a “transparent forensic audit” of the 2020 presidential election like that held in Arizona. Ironically, the Arizona effort not only reconfirmed Biden’s win in that state, but also determined he did so with approximately 260 more votes than the official election results.

Election Integrity Force and Fund is led by former Troy Mayor Janice Daniels, who was recalled from office after making a series of homophobic comments. She recently hosted an online conversation with Gelt discussing the decertification of the election, in which she referred to him as a “fine fellow patriot” and touted his website decertifymi.com. 

On that website, which uses the phrase, “Make Michigan Pure Again,” Gelt states (contrary to all evidence) that “the Presidency was stolen from the duly elected President and his team” based on evidence he claims is “overwhelming.” He then calls for a decertification of not only Michigan’s 2020 election results, but also those in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia and New Hampshire.

To achieve that goal, Decertify Michigan has a ballot measure that would initiate legislation “to make findings of fact and conclusions of law on the integrity of the 2020 general election finding a preponderance of the evidence that corrupt practices changed the outcome.” It then goes on to say if such legislation were passed, they are “calling for President Trump to be restored to a full four-years in the White House starting this 2022 election cycle” so that by January of 2023, Trump will be inaugurated and “his staff and cabinet will be restored to the Executive Branch of the US Government to serve out the four year term to which they were already elected in 2020.”

It also notes that they would need a minimum of 340,000 signatures by the end of May. Despite such a tight timeline, the website still does not have an actual copy of the petition available, although it states that one would be posted by Monday, more than a week ago.

Earlier this month, the Michigan Office of the Auditor General released a report finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Michigan and indicating the unprecedented number of post-election audits already conducted were, with some exceptions, sufficient. 

It was just the latest in a series of such examinations which have all contradicted the claims that the election results were not valid.