Mon. Mar 18th, 2024

From today’s New York Times:

In early 2021, with the turmoil of a bitterly contested presidential contest still fresh, several election clerks in Michigan received strange phone calls.

The person on the other end was a Republican state representative who told them their election equipment was needed for an investigation, according to documents from the Michigan attorney general’s office.

They obliged. Soon, the machines were being picked apart in hotels and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, outside Detroit, by conservative activists hunting for what they believed was proof of fraud, the documents said. Weeks later, after the equipment was returned in handoffs in highway car-pool lots and shopping malls, the clerks found that it had been tampered with, and in some cases, damaged.

The revelations of possible meddling with voting machines have set off a political tsunami in Michigan, one of the most critical battleground states in the country.

The documents detail deception of election officials and a breach of voting equipment that stand out as extraordinary even among the volumes of public reporting on brazen attempts by former President Donald J. Trump’s supporters to scrutinize and undermine the 2020 results.

But one of the most politically striking elements of the case is the identity of one of the people implicated in the scheme by the office of the attorney general: Matthew DePerno, who is now the presumptive Republican nominee for that very post.

Mr. DePerno, a lawyer who rose to prominence challenging the 2020 results in Antrim County and has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, is vying to unseat Dana Nessel, a Democrat who is Michigan’s top law enforcement official and who fought attempts to undermine the state’s election.

Read the complete story here.

By Editor