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LLast week, Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier stated on social media that he had uncovered definitive proof of widespread voter fraud in Detroit. He pointed to an absentee vote cast by “William Bradley, 118,” a man who had allegedly died in 1984.
“They are trying to steal the election,” Fournier warned in a since deleted Facebook post, although the election had already been called for Joe Biden by all major news networks days earlier.
But the late Bradley had not voted. Within days, Bradley’s son, also named William Bradley, but with a different middle name, told PolitiFact that he had cast the vote. That was confirmed by Michigan election officials, who said a clerk had entered the wrong Bradley as having voted. Although the living Bradley had also received an absentee ballot for his father, he said he threw it away, “because he didn’t want to mistake it for mine.”
The false claim that the late Bradley had voted in the November 3 election is one of numerous voter fraud conspiracy theories launched by Trump supporters across the country in recent weeks, all of which have been discredited without proof. that there are widespread irregularities.
Instead, the theories often reveal Trump supporters’ fundamental misunderstandings of the electoral system while creating a conspiracy theory game for election officials.
“We are confident that Michigan’s election was fair, safe and transparent, and the results are an accurate reflection of the will of the people,” Secretary of State spokeswoman Tracy Wimmer told The Guardian.
Bradley was just one of dozens of allegedly dead Michigan voters found alive. Trump supporters pointed to Jane Aiken of Napoleon Township, who claimed she was born in 1900, and cited an obituary as evidence that she had passed away. But the municipality’s deputy chief of police investigated and discovered that the obituary was for a different Jane Aiken.
Police told Bridge Magazine that the Aiken they voted for is “94 years old, alive and well. Very good, actually. “
Meanwhile, CNN examined the records of 50 Michigan citizens who Trump supporters say are dead voters. They found that 37 were dead and had not voted. Five are alive and voted, and the remaining eight are also alive but did not vote.
Michigan’s secretary of state cited several reasons for confusion. Although election officials across the country remove deceased persons from voter rolls annually, some are overlooked and remain registered voters. Occasionally, a worker will accidentally enter a vote from a living person as cast by a dead person with a similar name.
Voting software in Michigan also requires a date of birth for each voter. If an employee does not have it, then 1/1/1901 is used as a placeholder until the employee can find the exact date of birth. Right-wing conspiracy theorists pointed to multiple examples of residents with that birthday vote.
Among them was Donna Brydges, a 75-year-old Hamlin Township resident. In a phone call with the Associated Press this week, she confirmed that she is alive and passed the phone on to her husband so he could do the same. He added: “She really beat me in a game of cribbage.”
Michigan election officials “are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased person,” the secretary of state wrote on his website.
Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Trump supporters like Rep. Matt Gaetz reclaimed 21,000 dead in the state “leaned overwhelmingly for Biden.”
In fact, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation had filed a federal lawsuit on October 15 claiming there were 21,000 dead on the rolls and asked a judge to order their removal before the election. A judge found that more than half of the voters had already been removed, questioned PILF’s intentions and methodology, and did not require the state to take action.
The dead voter theory is just one of several conspiracies that Trump supporters have used to cast doubt on the election results.
In Pennsylvania, a postal worker who claimed to have overheard a supervisor ordering staff to back up late tickets retracted his allegation once he was visited by postal service investigators. In Arizona and Michigan, Trump supporters filed a lawsuit alleging that the votes were thrown out because they had used Sharpie markers to fill out their ballot, but quickly abandoned it.
Several viral videos also purported to reveal suspicious activity. In Detroit, Trump supporters claimed a video showed someone taking mail that was late for ballots to a vote counting center. Actually, he was a cameraman for WXYZ Detroit. managing his team in a wagon. Meanwhile, a video that according to Eric Trump showed 80 Trump ballots catching fire was proven to be false: the ballots were sample ballots.
The Trump campaign also claimed that recent federal lawsuits would prove widespread voter fraud with hundreds of pages of testimony from poll watchers and opponents of the polls in Michigan. Almost all of them have failed in court so far.
Although Trump and his supporters have claimed that thousands of the dead voted in Michigan, only one indictment was included in the lawsuits. Warren, Michigan resident Anita Chase wrote in an affidavit that her deceased son, Mark D Chase, who had passed away in July 2016, was marked on the secretary of state’s online voter tool as a voter in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.
But the secretary of state said Anita Chase had identified one of the other two Mark D Chases registered to vote in Michigan – a ballot had not been cast in her son’s name. In their response to the affidavits, Detroit election officials criticized the Trump campaign for such errors: “Most of the objections raised in the affidavits submitted are based on an extraordinary failure to understand how elections work.”
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