A massive citizen-led investigation of Detroit’s 2020 election records has uncovered that 12.4% of absentee ballots from taxpayer-subsidized housing facilities were counted without the official return envelopes required by Michigan law, raising serious questions about election integrity and legal compliance in the state’s largest city.
Volunteers Uncover Missing Envelopes
Over 100 volunteers are reviewing nearly one million documents from Detroit and Wayne County’s November 2020 election, records a judge finally forced the city to release after repeated denials of Freedom of Information Act requests. The team, led by Check My Vote founder Phani Mantravadi and New Jersey resident Yehuda Miller, has digitized and sequenced over 155,000 absentee ballot envelopes. Volunteers are flagging every questionable or illegally accepted ballot envelope that Detroit officials approved in 2020, with findings checked multiple times before public release.
Michigan law MCL 168.764a requires every absentee ballot to be returned in the official state-issued return envelope containing the voter’s signature certificate. Clerks have no discretion to ignore this requirement. The investigation discovered ballots counted from a non-existent address at 8286 Auburn Street in Detroit, where a voter successfully registered and received an absentee ballot. That voter has since been removed from Michigan voter rolls. Another envelope showed a German address on the USPS delivery label, signed October 30 but stamped received by Detroit on October 3.
Secretary of State’s Controversial Actions
In 2020, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was admonished by a judge for mailing 7.7 million unsolicited voter applications to every eligible voter without proper approval. She also directed local clerks to ignore signature verification requirements during Michigan’s largest mail-in election in history, when strict chain-of-custody rules and mandatory use of official absentee ballot envelopes were essential for election security. Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey’s knowledge of ballots being counted without proper envelopes remains under scrutiny.
What This Means
The investigators plan to release the full discrepancy between absentee ballots received versus official envelopes submitted by Detroit. Knowingly processing absentee ballots without proper official return envelopes constitutes a serious violation of Michigan Election Law. The current sample from taxpayer-subsidized housing represents just a fraction of the nearly one million documents under review, suggesting potential irregularities may extend beyond the 12.4% rate already documented in this limited sample.
