Minor mistakes aren’t the same as voter fraud, says former Michigan elections director in Senate testimony

GOP Chair Meshawn Maddock films inside while election challengers allege blockage from bipartisan poll watching Wednesday Nov. 4, 2020 at the TCF Center in Detroit, Michigan.

GOP Chair Meshawn Maddock films inside while election challengers allege blockage from bipartisan poll watching Wednesday Nov. 4, 2020 at the TCF Center in Detroit, Michigan. Nicole Hester/Mlive.com

LANSING, MI - When Rudy Giuliani and his witnesses challenged election results last week in front of the House Oversight Committee, nobody testified under oath.

The same was true the day before with election challengers in the Senate Oversight Committee. That pattern changed Tuesday during three hours of sworn testimony from Chris Thomas, a former state elections director who served as an elections advisor to Detroit this fall.

Committee Chair Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, said even though swearing in witnesses for legislative hearings has not been the norm in the past, it must be done going forward with election oversight hearings.

“I wish that we had started from the beginning,” he said. “I intend to be consistent through the remainder of the hearings.”

With the oath out of the way, Thomas testified to Detroit’s “outstanding” achievement in pulling off this November’s election given the enormous shift from predominantly in-person voting to mostly absentee balloting.

“I want to thank you for this opportunity to testify on how Detroit, in the midst of a pandemic, flipped their turnout from 78% in-person voting (in previous elections)... to 68% mail turnout,” he said. “In my experience of 40-plus years of election administration, I find this a phenomenal accomplishment.”

Despite the challenge, the level of mistakes were minor and should not be confused with widespread fraud, Thomas said. The number of ballots in question is negligible, Thomas said, considering the 172,000 absentee ballots Detroit workers at the TCF Center had to process on election night.

“Election officials across the state have labored under enormous mail ballot volume and performed extremely well,” he said. “Those who wish to turn this election into some type of disaster have missed the big picture.”

Thomas, who helmed the Michigan Bureau of Elections for 36 years under both Republican and Democratic governors, spoke with MLive last week to fact check several elements of Giuliani’s testimony:

On Tuesday, Thomas repeated many of his refutations of testimony from Giuliani and several of the witnesses he brought forward. He also took some time to defend the cybersecurity of Detroit election computers, which ran on a local server without an internet connection. Former state Sen. Patrick Colbeck speculated that ballot information was transmitted via internet, which could have led to remote ballot tampering.

“There was nothing transmitted (via internet) at TCF,” he said. “Folks can talk until they’re blue in the face, but there was nothing transmitted from TCF.”

Related: Judge denies request for Wayne County election audit, citing audit already planned by Secretary of State

The bigger problem, he said, was how Michigan election workers only had one day to pre-process 110,000 out of 140,000 absentee ballots that arrived before Nov. 3. The legislature and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer should have approved more pre-processing time like some other states did to help prevent slight precinct imbalances across the state, he said.

“This is not a Detroit phenomenon,” he said. “When you have that volume of ballots coming in, with that level of pre-processing, that’s what you’re going to get. You notice states like Ohio pre-processes into a tabulator 17 days before an election... no problems... Florida, after their problems in 2000, they actually changed their system. They created early voting, and they gave their counties 22 days before the election to pre-process their ballots. By 9 o’clock, Florida’s returns were basically in.”

He also testified that 16,000 ballots showed up after the 8 p.m. deadline, not 50,000, like many claimed, and that the late delivery of ballots is something that happens every election in Detroit.

“It’s always an inflated number,” Thomas said. “... From my perspective, there was 16,000 ballots. There was not a second delivery... they brought in extra blank ballots, because they had to duplicate the military and overseas ballots. There was no delivery of additional ballots.”

Military and overseas ballots have a “greater risk of being damaged or otherwise rendered unreadable by ballot tabulation scanners, and thus require ballot duplication processing prior to counting,” according to the Council of State Governments.

In general, Thomas said that many of the witnesses questioning the election process “were not necessarily attuned to what they were looking at.”

Thomas’ testimony was not without challenges from Republican senators. Separate exchanges between Thomas and Sen. Pete Lucido, R-Shelby Twp., and Sen. Michael MacDonald, R-Macomb Twp., involved raised voices with McBroom having to play mediator.

Lucido, recently elected to become Macomb County Prosecutor, interrupted Thomas in the middle of several answers to his questions. During a question about the “chain of custody” of ballots, Thomas told Lucido with exasperation that the senator can “continue just yelling” at him, which led to a shouting match that McBroom deescalated.

In the exchange with MacDonald, the senator asked Thomas to clarify whether there was any sort of internet connectivity in the TCF Center while ballots Thomas said there was a Wi-Fi hotspot for workers to access the qualified voter file, but not internet connectivity in any of the tabulating machines or computers.

The exchange again deteriorated into shouts and confusion.

Overall, Thomas testified that the problems President Donald Trump had in Michigan in November were not Detroit-based

“The President lost the election in Kent County,” he said. “He lost the election in Oakland County and western Wayne County.”

Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden by about 154,000 votes, or about 15 times the margin that he carried to win over Hilary Clinton in 2016.

Read more from MLive:

Judge denies request for Wayne County election audit, citing audit already planned by Secretary of State

Texas sues Michigan, other states over election procedures in lawsuit Nessel calls ‘publicity stunt’

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‘Ship has sailed,’ federal judge says while denying Republican request to block Michigan election results

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