Punching bags hanging inside Hamtramck’s city clerk’s office — one with mayoral candidate Muhith Mahmood’s face taped to it — helped set off a chain of events that left 37 ballots uncounted in the city’s Nov. 5 mayoral election, a race Mahmood lost by just 11 votes.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Mahmood, a former city council member, told Votebeat the episode has left him and his supporters questioning the outcome. “We all talk about transparency,” he said. “This is not a good example.”

Mayor Adam Alharbi, who defeated Mahmood in the race for mayor and was sworn in in January, confirmed Tuesday that the punching bags were one reason interim City Manager Alexander Lagrou and a number of other unauthorized city officials entered the clerk’s office after the polls closed on Election Day. Aside from Mahmood, the image of a City Council candidate whose name is not yet public was also featured on the bags.

Inside the office were 37 uncounted absentee ballots. Officials’ entry broke the chain of custody, and canvassers ultimately chose not to count them as a result. Though those ballots could have changed the outcome of the narrowly decided race, they were not part of the count — including the recount requested by Mahmood, which slightly increased Alharbi’s margin of victory from 6 to 11 votes.

The fallout has upended Hamtramck City Hall. Former City Clerk Rana Faraj’s firing was reported Tuesday by The Detroit News, with officials citing the punching bags and the handling of the ballots as reasons for her dismissal. Meanwhile, Mahmood has appealed a judge’s decision allowing the ballots to remain excluded, leaving the legitimacy of the razor-thin result under continued scrutiny.

That December ruling said that canvassers had the authority to leave the 37 ballots out of the final count. The case now sits before the Michigan Court of Appeals.

No one knows who cast those ballots or who they were for. Months after Alharbi was sworn in as the city’s new mayor, Mahmood and his supporters still harbor doubts.

“Whoever they voted for, that should be in the count,” Mahmood said.

Alharbi maintains that the 37 ballots “came after the election” and should not have been counted to begin with. He has referred to them in the past as “fraudulent,” a characterization disputed by other officials and Mahmood’s lawyers.

Alharbi told Votebeat the decision to fire Faraj was tied in part to what he called “a clear lack of professional neutrality in office” as well as procedural errors relating to elections.

Faraj was placed on paid leave shortly after the November election. In December, she filed a lawsuit alleging that several city officials were retaliating against her for trying to flag “ongoing election integrity issues” in the city.

An attorney representing Faraj did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

How did Hamtramck get here?

Faraj has said that her staff noticed the discrepancy between the number of ballots received and those tabulated on election night. The missing 37 ballots, Deputy Clerk Abe Siblani told Votebeat in November, were the result of “human error at the counting board” where ballots are supposed to be fed into the tabulator.

In her lawsuit, Faraj suggested the problem occurred after workers cut the ballot envelopes open but then mistakenly mixed them with empty envelopes instead of tabulating them.

The ballots were unaccounted for until Nov. 7, when they were discovered, sealed, and ultimately delivered to the county under police escort.

By then, Lagrou and several other non-election officials had already entered the office — a move that broke the ballots’ chain of custody, the system meant to ensure the secure transfer of election documents throughout the election process. City officials have said no one knew the ballots were there at the time. But once the chain was broken, the fight over whether the ballots could be counted began.

Canvassers ultimately declined to take action, leaving the 37 ballots out of the final results.

Uncertainty in a city wracked by election problems

The dispute has unfolded against a backdrop of broader election turmoil in Hamtramck.

In August, two council members were charged with felonies after allegedly forging signatures on absentee ballots during the city’s 2023 council elections. One of them, Muhtasin Sadman, pleaded guilty to reduced charges late last month. The other, Mohammed Hassan, is scheduled for a jury trial next month, according to court records.

Four other men — including three current council members — were named in an April document Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel used to seek a special prosecutor in the case. Nessel has been a vocal critic against Hamtramck’s LGBTQ policies and the petition notes that critics have accused her of bringing other prosecutions due to anti-Muslim bias. Monroe County Prosecutor Jeffery Yorkey has been appointed, but did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

No other charges have been filed.

Alharbi said Hamtramck is working to rebuild its reputation and show “we’re not that anymore,” pushing back against assumptions that city officials are criminals. The punching bags are gone, he said, and he looks forward to welcoming in a new clerk. Alharbi said the city already has applicants for the job.

“And now,” he said, “we have a secure door on that office.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Michigan’s so-called “false electors” case is over after Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Monday she would not appeal a judge’s decision to dismiss the charges faced by 16 individuals who signed documents attempting to certify Michigan’s slate of electors for Donald Trump in 2020, despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

In a sweeping 110-page report, Nessel said that she still believes false electors committed crimes, but concluded that the resource-intensive case would be unlikely to ultimately succeed. She also said it was “fundamentally unjust” to continue prosecuting lower-level participants in an effort she said was led by the now President Donald Trump, who she said is unlikely to ever face his own criminal charges.

“We considered that Michigan’s Republican elector nominees, who eventually became Michigan’s false slate, did not design or demand this criminal conspiracy. As shown by the Report of Special Counsel Smith regarding these matters, this was indeed Trump’s criminal conspiracy,” the report said. “The dismissal of the false slate charges does not change the facts, and it does not change history. What Michigan’s false slate did was wrong.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The individuals charged in July 2023 — primarily with offenses related to forgery — included Stan Grot, the Shelby Township Clerk, and Meshawn Maddock, former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and wife of State Rep. Matt Maddock. Charges against one of the 16 were earlier dropped as part of a cooperation agreement.

Votebeat reached out to several of the now-former defendants but did not immediately hear back Monday.

Judge Kristen Simmons, of the 54-A District Court in Lansing, dismissed charges against the remaining 15 defendants in September. Simmons, an appointee of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, said she felt there was not sufficient evidence from the prosecutors to prove the alleged “false electors” had criminal intent.

Simmons ultimately decided not to bind the case over for trial, meaning she believed prosecutors had not presented enough evidence at the preliminary stage to move the case forward.

The report details that prosecutors believe an appeals court would have sided with Nessel’s office on the argument that forgery is not just a property crime, as Simmons had found. But proving that element of criminal intent Simmons highlighted could have been “more complicated.”

The unusually detailed report exists “to ensure that the full record of what happened, and why it mattered, is fully and accurately documented,” according to its opening lines, even though the criminal case will not move forward.

Legal experts say it’s rare for a state attorney general to publish such an in-depth report after declining to file charges. In other states — including Nevada, Wisconsin and New Mexico — false elector cases have been dismissed, narrowed or otherwise stalled without a comparable public explanation. Trump last year issued a sweeping federal pardon for dozens of people involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the so-called false electors, but his pardon power doesn’t extend to state charges.

That Nessel, who is term-limited and will leave office Jan. 1, chose to publish such a sweeping report underscores how politically and emotionally charged the issue remains five years later, said Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame law school.

“There are a lot of people who were duped with misinformation with respect to the results of the 2020 election,” Muller said. “There’s a righteous anger after what happened. But you can have righteous anger and still not have criminal activity, and I think that’s just sometimes the difficulty of situations like this.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

State Rep. Rachelle Smit, a former local clerk who believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Donald Trump, will run the Michigan House’s committee on elections under the new GOP leadership.

Smit, a Republican from Martin, was named the chair of the House’s Election Integrity Committee, as it has now been renamed. Her claims that the 2020 election was stolen have been roundly debunked but won her an endorsement from President Donald Trump, who praised her as someone “who knows our Elections are not secure, and that there was rampant Voter Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

“I absolutely think that it was stolen, yeah, and I’m not shy to say that,” Smit said in an interview with Votebeat, repeating false claims that there were “ballot dumps” in the early morning hours after Election Day in 2020.

In 2023, she argued that a group of Michigan Trump supporters charged with creating a forged slate of electors for Trump after the 2020 election, despite Joe Biden’s win in Michigan, had not done anything wrong and said that their actions were “completely legal.” She has also supported Dar Leaf, the Barry County sheriff who has gotten national attention for his efforts to investigate the 2020 election.

Smit, who also serves as speaker pro tempore of the Michigan House, was township clerk in Martin, in southwestern Michigan, before running for state office. Last session, when Democrats still controlled the House, she was the minority vice chair of the elections committee.

Now, as head of the committee, she will direct its progress over the next two years on legislation related to voting, elections, campaign finance, and more. That includes the Republican-led effort to amend Michigan’s Constitution to require voters to show proof of citizenship, which Smit is co-sponsoring. The House joint resolution, introduced Wednesday, will stop first in the election integrity committee before it likely goes before the full House.

“It’s of the utmost importance,” she said. “That’s going to be the first order of business that we take up.”

Like other Republicans in the House, Smit said she has no reason to believe Michigan’s elections aren’t secure. Rather, she said, she hopes to make clear to Michigan residents that legislators take the integrity of the state’s elections seriously.

Leader of clerks group points to successful 2024 election

Groups dedicated to expanding access to the ballot box have approached Smit’s leadership position with cautious optimism. Promote The Vote, a coalition of voting access groups that helped get 2022’s Proposal 2 in front of voters, said in a statement that it looks forward to working with her “to ensure that our elections remain secure and accessible.”

Melanie Ryska, Sterling Heights city clerk and the president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks, said that her group is committed to supporting voters’ rights and the security of elections. She also wondered at what point elections officials at every level would move on from the false claims and conspiracy theories that grew out of the 2020 presidential election.

Both Ryska and Promote The Vote said that Smit’s time as a clerk was likely to give her “unique insight” into election administration in the state. But given that Michigan is just a few months past another successful presidential election, Ryska questioned the need for more expansive rewrites of election law. She said she felt local officials “answered the call,” despite a flurry of constitutional changes in recent years.

“Our clerks showed that elections are secure and that there are plenty of checks and balances in place,” Ryska said.

Smit’s other priorities for the committee include finding vulnerabilities in the state’s election laws and cleaning up laws on specific government vacancies like the one her district saw last term. When an Allegan County commissioner up for election died in August just before the primary, the remaining commissioners appointed a new member. But the law is fuzzy on who should have been on the ballot in place of the commissioner who died.

Smit introduced a bill with two other Republicans and a Democrat last year to try to address it, but it didn’t make it out of committee after legislative activity in the House effectively collapsed in the last few weeks of the year.

The Michigan Voting Rights Act, which also died late in the session after winning the support of the Michigan Senate, will not make a comeback. The package of bills would have expanded the availability of ballots in different languages and broadly aimed to prevent voter suppression, among other changes. Supporters said it aimed to fill in the gaps in the federal Voting Rights Act that have been eroded by court decisions.

Smit had expressed concerns about that package during committee hearings last session, and now that she’s leading the committee, she said she “can’t get on board” with the bills.

During a hearing on them in December, Smit said she had heard from a number of local clerks who were against it. The state’s clerks associations remained neutral on the proposals, supporting the ideas behind them but expressing concerns about funding and the additional burden on clerks who were already managing a variety of changes to election law in recent years.

“That’s a very strong message that this is not the right way about doing that,” she said last week.

Who is on the election integrity committee?

Other committee members on the Republican side include Rep. Joseph Fox, from Fremont, as the vice chair and Reps. Pat Outman of Six Lakes, Greg Alexander of Carsonville, Mike Hoadley of Au Gres, and Joseph Pavlov of Smiths Creek. Each of those representatives co-sponsored the House joint resolution that proposed the proof-of-citizenship constitutional amendment.

Democrats on the committee are Reps. Stephen Wooden of Grand Rapids, Matt Koleszar of Plymouth, and Mai Xiong of Warren. Wooden, who is in his first term in the legislature, will be the minority vice chair.

Wooden acknowledged he wouldn’t have much control over the agenda, but he told Votebeat that he looked forward to finding common ground with Republican committee members.

“I know that often, the elections committee can be a place where you see some of the most bipartisan, commonsense legislation by working with the clerks to get mechanical changes to our elections and ensure our elections are moving smoothly,” he said.

The committee is expected to meet in the coming days, although no official time has yet been set.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

After taking control of the Michigan House of Representatives, Republican lawmakers have begun shaping their election policy priorities. They’ve made one conspicuous change already: renaming the House’s Elections Committee — a standing body that outlives the control of any one party — the Election Integrity Committee.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Republicans in Michigan and around the country continue to push the theme of election integrity as a counterweight to Democratic efforts to expand voting access. Whether the committee name change amounts to a mere branding exercise, or represents a firm marker of election policy priorities for Michigan’s House leaders will become clearer in the coming weeks, as members of the committee are chosen and leaders lay out their agenda.

For now, it makes Michigan one of the first few states to have a legislative group dedicated by name to the idea of election integrity.

Committee name changes often happen as chambers swap party control. In past years, for instance, that same House committee has been named “elections and ethics” to show a shared focus. Other committees have gotten the same treatment: In at least one session, the standing committee on education was the “education reform committee.”

Rep. Ann Bollin, a Republican from Brighton Township, said that the new name change isn’t to suggest that Michigan’s elections lack integrity. Instead, she said, it suggests a commitment to reaffirming the strength of the state’s elections.

“We don’t need a lot of fraud to want to prevent it,” she said.

Bollin was formerly a city clerk for 16 years and chaired the Elections Committee when Republicans last controlled the House in the 2021-2022 session.

Republican leaders have made clear that they want to find ways to push through measures that have been promoted around the country in the name of election integrity. Rep. Bryan Posthumus of Rockford, the new House majority leader, has said repeatedly that he is prepared to introduce a proposal for a constitutional amendment that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register, and implement stricter ID requirements for casting a ballot.

Getting such a measure on the ballot through legislative action would require a two-thirds vote of both chambers, and it’s unlikely to gain a lot of traction in the Democratic-held Michigan Senate. But a group backed by conservative donors has already organized an effort to gather signatures on petitions that would put the issue on the ballot if the effort in the legislature fails.

The group, the Committee to Protect Voters’ Rights, shares a treasurer with the now-defunct group Protect My Vote, according to state campaign finance records. Protect My Vote was the main opposition to 2018’s Proposal 3, which amended the state constitution to allow for same-day registration and no-reason absentee voting.

Posthumus was not available for comment Thursday.

Just over a week into the session, no elections-focused legislation has been introduced in either chamber. It’s possible certain pieces of legislation from last session, most notably the Michigan Voting Rights Act which sought to expand access for voters with disabilities or who don’t speak English, may come back in a modified form, but Republicans have expressed no support for the bills as proposed and voted against it last session.

A Republican effort to focus attention on noncitizen voting — an exceedingly rare occurrence — as a potential concern with U.S. elections could resonate in Michigan after a University of Michigan student from China was charged with casting a ballot in the 2024 election despite not being a citizen.

Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat from Southfield who runs the Senate Elections Committee, said the election priorities in his chamber wouldn’t change. He said he was eager to see who would be on the House committee to start forming inroads with them.

“There are certainly some Republicans in the House that have been great to work with on these issues, and I don’t want to paint everybody with a broad brush,” he said. “This could be a committee that is just in name only ‘election integrity,’ but it still does the normal business of updating and modernizing our laws, or it could be a committee of conspiracy theorists. Our work continues regardless.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

In Michigan’s Wayne and Macomb counties, it’s common for several hours to pass between when polls close and when unofficial results — the ones used to call races across the country — start to come in.

With results from those two populous counties poised to determine who carries the state and wins the presidential election, what might happen during those hours has a lot of election officials and experts worried.

In 2020, as returns trickled in on election night without a declared winner in Michigan, the absence of conclusive results left a daylong information vacuum that quickly filled with mis- and disinformation driven by then-President Donald Trump and his allies. Crowds responding to their false claims created an uproar at Detroit’s vote counting center and cast doubts over the whole state’s elections.

Officials have made a number of changes since then at the local and state level to get votes counted faster, make elections more secure, and avert such commotion. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said earlier this week that Michigan is likely to have results within 24 hours of the polls closing.

Even so, there are several factors that could disrupt that timeline, and there is a significant chance that delays will happen again during next week’s election.

If they do, experts say, misinformation is again likely to creep in and poison faith in Michigan’s elections.

“That period of uncertainty while voters wait to understand what’s happening and what the results are of an election, that is a ripe period for bad actors to point the fingers and say, ‘Look, something is wrong,’” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, a nonprofit group that advocates for media’s role in democracy. “It’s at that very moment when we need to help turn down the temperature and set expectations.”

Why results take time, and what officials are doing about it

Counting ballots and tabulating unofficial results has always been a long process. In many counties, municipal clerks have to get Election Day results to the county electronically, through secure file transfers, or physically, by transporting data storage devices with the results, which can take hours.

There are also growing numbers of absentee ballots to deal with, as Michigan now offers voters the opportunity to stay permanently on the absentee list. Those ballots can take a while to process — workers must verify signatures and ensure ballot numbers match before they can put them in a tabulator.

To try to ease some of the burden, and get results reported faster, the state now allows local clerks to begin “pre-processing” absentee ballots, or getting a head start on the verification steps, as much as eight days before Election Day. They still have to wait until after polls close on Election Day to calculate the vote totals from those ballots.

The change is especially important for large jurisdictions that would otherwise need to process thousands of mailed ballots on a busy Election Day. But not every large city is taking advantage of the option.

In Warren, the third-largest city in Michigan and the largest in Macomb County, City Clerk Sonja Buffa has opted not to pre-process ballots, going against the guidance of county and state officials.

“Pre-processing is not the law,” Buffa told Votebeat. “We do everything that is mandated.”

That decision could reflect poorly on the county and the state, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini warned.

“All the clerks that are doing a great job? It’ll make them look bad,” Forlini said. “The rest of the country is going to be waiting on Macomb County.”

Dorian Tyus, spokesperson for the Wayne County Clerk’s Office, said that Wayne typically has results come in slower because the county’s large population of about 1.7 million people means there are more ballots to be processed by local clerks.

Besides their size, there are other reasons Wayne and Macomb counties tend to be slower than other similar counties.

Oakland County — the second most populous in the state — uses tabulators made by Hart InterCivic, which can send unofficial results directly from the precinct tabulators to local and county clerks over a secure cellular network, said Lisa Brown, Oakland County clerk.

In communities that use other machines — Wayne uses Dominion Voting Systems, and Macomb uses machines from Election Systems & Software — that’s not an option. Communities are often permitted to send unofficial results through secure file transfers — closed computer systems that allow local clerks to send results directly to the county — which are then verified further when local clerks physically transport the results to the county clerk.

That extra step can create new problems: During the August primary, for example, Detroit struggled to submit its results electronically to Wayne County due to what officials described as a problem with a firewall. County officials had to wait for the data to be transported in person, slowing the release of countywide results by hours. By 1 a.m., almost no results were reported in Wayne County; in Detroit, results were not posted until around 7:30 a.m. the following day.

Speaking Thursday, Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey and Director of Elections Daniel Baxter assured the public that the city had fixed the problem and expected to have results in no later than midnight.

Beware of misinformation — unintentional and deliberate

What concerns election officials is that any delays, expected or unexpected, can fuel misinformation. Election officials at all levels have tried to combat it by better preparing voters on what to expect on Election Day — when results may be in, what the standard processes are. Not every problem can be easily explained, though, and it can be difficult to contain false information that spreads at viral speed.

Some people spread misinformation unintentionally, Benavidez said, because they get caught up in the moment and the emotion tied to it. Elections can make people feel particularly vulnerable, she said.

But plenty of people deliberately spread things that are provably untrue, to advance a point of view or campaign.

“There are those who are seeking to warp people’s perception of reality, to weaponize the democratic process, and seek political power. We’ve seen this in other countries,” Benavidez said, adding that such distortions can be a precursor to authoritarianism.

“Those who promote false claims are often doing it for their own political gain or for money,” she said.

In 2020, misinformation led hundreds of Trump supporters to protest at the convention hall now known as Huntington Place, where Detroit poll workers were counting votes on election night. Spurred on by a candidate who falsely claimed that “ballot dumps” were costing him the election, they demanded to be let in to serve as challengers and watchers, even though many accredited Republicans were already serving in those roles. And when they were denied entry, they pounded on the windows of the room where counting was happening, menacing poll workers and demanding that the count be stopped.

Steps to speed up results depend on communities participating

Michigan has since enacted a variety of laws to prevent such messes. In addition to expanding pre-processing of absentee ballots, it has guaranteed access to early voting, giving voters across the state at least nine additional days to cast their ballots in person.

All the changes aim to make elections smoother and bring in results faster, which is partly why Buffa’s decision to not pre-process ballots in Warren has drawn so much ire.

Buffa told Votebeat that she has been a clerk for 24 years, which has covered seven presidential elections. At this point, she said, she’s not willing to do anything that’s “not comfortable.”

Warren, home to just under 140,000 people, is by far the largest community that’s not pre-processing absentee ballots. Nearly 28,000 Warren voters have requested absentee ballots, according to the state’s dashboard. As of Thursday, more than 19,500 voters had already returned them, putting Warren in the top 10 cities across the state for returned absentee ballots.

Benson confirmed that 245 jurisdictions across the state would be pre-processing in some way, adding that her office reached out to Buffa to offer support.

“I would hope every clerk take advantage of every option to ensure efficiency, security, and accuracy when processing and tabulating their votes,” Benson said.

“If there is one community that is lagging behind others, and it’s Warren,” she added later, “we’ll be open about that, so we can make sure everyone knows exactly what’s happening.”

Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, said that the problem with any sort of delay is that despite broad changes to voting practices in recent elections, many Americans still expect results the same night. That largely stems from a time when elections had wider margins, she said.

When margins are much closer — like Joe Biden’s 2.8-percentage-point win in Michigan in 2020 — national news outlets that typically project winners wait until they have a high level of confidence in the results. Most people don’t have the deeper understanding of elections that helps explain why results take so long or how ballots are processed, Cohen said, and people “sort of filled in the blanks” in 2020 when they didn’t have other information to go on.

What should people conclude if results are taking longer than they’d like?

“Any delay is a result of election officials tabulating every eligible ballot,” Cohen said. “It’s the opposite of a security concern.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.