Before the polls opened on election day 2022, at our East Lansing precinct, the other election inspectors and I huddled quickly, agreeing that if anyone charged in to try to block voting or threaten the process in any way, we would protect the tabulator. We would protect that which counts and stores the cast ballots, ensuring our free, fair and honest election would not be corrupted.
In 2022, the fear was of disgruntled supporters of then-former President Donald Trump trying to interfere. But the 2022 election, as Michigan elections do, ran smoothly, with no interference, and certainly no voter fraud.
It’s 2026. Trump is back in office. We now have bigger worries for the 2026 election, starting with the Aug. 4 primary.
Trump is attacking an election system that works
In the past months, Trump
and his administration have gone haywire trying to torpedo the 2026 election.
His most direct attack was at Michigan.
Michigan has an honest electoral system. Attempts to cheat are rooted out and dealt with. There is no verifiable evidence of any major voter fraud effort succeeding in Michigan, for decades. Indeed, as the Heritage Foundation itself has found ‒ that is the group that gave us Project 2025 ‒ there is no evidence nationwide of major voting fraud attempts over more than 40 years.
Trump’s meritless claims of voter fraud are an affront to the thousands of Michigan local officials – Republican and Democrat ‒ working hard to ensure free, fair and secure elections.
It insults the thousands of volunteers ‒ myself, my wife and others ‒ who swear an oath to ensure honest elections. It insults the state workers overseeing our statewide system. It insults the election challengers the Republican and Democratic parties both send to witness the voting process.
Mostly, it insults us, the people of Michigan, who hold voting as almost a sacred rite to be honored and not defiled. (In the 2024 election, only our neighbors Wisconsin and Minnesota had higher voter turnout.)
Fellow Michiganders, Trump and his quisling Department of Justice have grossly insulted us.
In the last month, the Trump administration had the Justice Department send letters to all 50 state election officials warning that they could be criminally prosecuted if non-citizens vote (Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor called it a threat by “love letter”).
Trump fired two Democratic members of the federal Election Assistance Commission (which, as its name implies, helps states with voting questions and issues), thus gutting it; the third, a Republican, resigned.
With housing prices hitting new highs, he refused to sign a bipartisan affordable housing bill because Congress hasn’t passed his “SAVE” Act, which would harm millions of American voters. The housing bill became law anyway.
The most serious action was the direct intimidation threat the unjust DOJ issued to election officials in Detroit, Lansing and East Lansing. The DOJ is sending “monitors” for the Aug. 4 primary. The DOJ accused the cities of allowing non-qualified voters to vote, and struggling with long lines in 2024.
Oh, and the department of injustice folks will show up a week ahead of Aug. 4 to go over the details with our local clerks. How considerate.
Election monitors on a mission to intimidate
The “charges” justifying the “monitoring” are blathering bags of buffoonery, balderdash and other criticisms starting with the letter “b.”
Non-qualified voters? Well, there is the ongoing delusion that scores of non-citizens vote. They don’t.
This charge also presumably deals with some voters not in Michigan’s Qualified Voter File. Michigan permits same-day voter registration, and more than 10,000 people across the state did so on election day 2024. Those, one suspects, may not have immediately appeared in the QVF.
The second complaint: There were long lines at the polls. The longest anyone has had to wait at our precincts was five minutes, tops, because most people don’t go to the polls, they vote early, either by absentee mail-in ballots (as Michigan law allows) or by going to early voting centers.
Therefore, the DOJ’s purpose is simple: intimidation. An attempt to scare voters away in three communities which tends to vote Democratic. Roget’s Thesaurus may not list “monitor” as a synonym for “intimidation,” but that is what our president’s fawning agents intend.
It caters to Trump’s paranoiac delusion that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and his insistence Democrats can only win elections by cheating.
It’s a delusion following a specific strategy adopted as official Republican electoral tactics by former GOP U.S. House leader, and later speaker, Newt Gingrich, in the 1990s. GOPAC, which he directed, encouraged Republican candidates to call their opponents sick, corrupt, thieves, cheaters and traitors. Oh, he did. Look it up.
Michigan is a warning to voters across America
Has voter fraud existed? Of course it has. Boss Tweed in New York City in the 19th Century spoke of not caring who was elected, just who was nominated. In his masterful biography of President Lyndon Johnson, author Robert Caro showed how corruption clearly played a role in one of Johnson’s early Texas elections.
As voting systems grew more sophisticated and secure, as more people got the power to vote and did vote, as information sources became more widespread, as laws toughened against it, actual voter fraud has all but vanished.
So, the point of “monitoring” our primary can only be intimidation, and not just here in the Great Lake State. We are the chosen warning to the rest of the country, and people are taking note.
Trump has threatened to nationalize elections. Shipping “monitors” to Detroit, Lansing and East Lansing is a first step in that direction, and a way to scare every community in this country.
The hundreds of FBI agents assigned to prove that the 2020 election in Georgia was stolen from Trump are dealing with the past. “Monitors” deal with the now.
By what “rules” will the “monitors” monitor? Will they be posted in the precincts? Will they insist on looking over the inspectors, going over our work as we verify that a voter can vote? Will they attempt to prevent legal voters from casting ballots?
Will they insist on seizing ballots from the tabulators? Or try to conduct a hand count right there at a precinct? Or bar city officials in Detroit, Lansing and East Lansing from certifying the city’s results, and instead insist they do the tabulations and release the results? These are serious questions.
Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson have already protested this announcement. The city clerks have had their say in opposing the action. Now the people must speak.
What you can do
Speak first by voting. Speak secondly by monitoring the elections yourself. Chairs will be available (make sure you bring a book or magazine).
And speak out by contacting your Congressional representatives, wherever you are in Michigan, and complain loudly about the “monitors.” Create the record which can be used to challenge the “monitoring.”
These are not Trump’s elections, these are the people’s elections. Established by our Constitution, held without fail in peace and war, open to all qualified individuals, who decides which candidates become our employees in Congress and the White House.
Remember, paraphrasing John Donne: Ask not whom the “monitor” watches; he watches you.
Free Press contributing columnist John Lindstrom has covered Michigan politics for 50 years. He retired as publisher of Gongwer, a Lansing news service, in 2019. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump is using Michigan to intimidate voters nationwide | Opinion
