Trump, Giuliani continue to peddle baseless election conspiracies about Michigan

In a longshot bid to overturn the results of the November election won by President-elect Joe Biden, President Donald Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani continued to peddle baseless conspiracy theories of election fraud Wednesday.

In a speech Trump gave at the White House and remarks Giuliani made before the House Oversight Committee in Michigan, the two leveled a number of false allegations about absentee ballots counted in Detroit. The allegations have already been discredited by election officials and in court.

More:Fiery Giuliani tells Michigan lawmakers election 'stolen,' offers no credible evidence

But that didn't stop Trump from falsely claiming that he won the election in Michigan when in fact he lost the state by more than 154,000 votes.

Appearing before the oversight committee Wednesday evening, Giuliani, who is in charge of the Trump campaign's election-related litigation, repeated wild claims that election software changed votes and that votes were counted overseas. He spent most of his time questioning people who said they witnessed election fraud at the TCF Center in Detroit, where Detroit election workers processed and counted absentee ballots cast by the city's voters. Their allegations were already brought forward in a lawsuit whose account of the events that took place at the TCF Center was rejected as inaccurate and lacking credibility in court.

The House committee launched a joint investigation with the Senate Oversight Committee into the November election the same day major television networks declared that Biden won the presidency.

Here's a round-up of some of the false claims made by Trump and Giuliani.

Trump's claim: Michigan "instituted universal absentee balloting right in the middle of an election year."

This is misleading. In 2018, Michigan voters supported a constitutional amendment to allow voters in the state to vote absentee for any reason. Before the amendment was adopted, absentee voting was limited to a small subset of voters such as seniors and members of the military. The adoption of no-reason absentee voting in Michigan was not a response to the coronavirus pandemic. The November election was the first presidential election in which Michiganders could exercise their new constitutional right to vote absentee for any reason.

More:Americans decided their own truth this election season

Trump's claim: "Dozens of counties in key swing states have more registered voters on the rolls than they have voting-age citizens, including 67 counties in Michigan."

In an effort to cast doubt on the election outcome, Trump pointed to Michigan counties where the number of people registered to vote exceeds the number of voting-age citizens. In 66 counties, the number of people registered to vote as of October 2020 was greater than the number of 18-year-olds in the county, according to census estimates. That suggests that individuals who have moved, passed away or are otherwise ineligible to vote are still listed as registered voters, but that's not a sign of fraud. All ballots cast in Michigan's elections are verified to ensure that they were cast by eligible voters before they are counted.

More:Michigan was a hotbed for election-related misinformation: Here are 17 key fact checks

Trump's claim: "In Michigan a career employee of the city of Detroit witnessed city workers coaching voters to vote straight Democrat. ... The same worker says she was instructed not to ask for any ID and not to attempt to validate any signatures. She was also told to illegally back date ballots many, many ballots received after the deadline."

Trump seemed to be referring to Jessy Jacob, an employee for the city of Detroit, who filed an affidavit in a lawsuit alleging election fraud in Detroit and was questioned by Giuliani during the oversight meeting Wednesday evening. Jacob said she worked at the Department of Elections for most of September and began working at a satellite clerk's office during October. She said she processed ballots at the TCF Center.

Jacob claims that she saw Detroit election workers telling voters to vote for Biden and Democratic candidates and was instructed not to ask voters for an ID. The Michigan election officials' manual instructs election workers to ask voters to show a picture ID but voters are not required to show one in order to vote. If they don't have an ID, they can sign an affidavit and still vote. Jacob said she was told not to verify signatures on absentee ballots when she worked at the TCF Center. Signature verification did not take place at the TCF. It took place at the city clerk's office before ballots were sent to the TCF. Finally, Jacob said she was told to pre-date absentee ballots that were received after the 8 p.m. Election Day deadline. Chris Thomas, who served as a special adviser to Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey for November's election, discredited this claim in an affidavit he submitted in the same lawsuit.

Thomas explained that some election workers at satellite offices did not enter the date stamped on the absentee ballot envelope indicating when the ballot was returned into an electronic file containing the voter's information. When this was discovered, Thomas said election workers were instructed to enter the date on the absentee ballot envelope into the electronic system so the ballots could be processed and counted. He said that no ballots that were returned after the 8 p.m. Election Day deadline ever made their way to the TCF Center to be counted.

In his opinion in the lawsuit, Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy Kenny wrote that "the allegations made by Ms. Jacob are serious" but pointed out that "Ms. Jacob's information is generalized" and "offers no indication of whether she took steps to address the alleged misconduct." Kenny also pointed out that "Jacob only came forward after the unofficial results of the voting indicated former Vice President Biden was the winner in the state of Michigan."

Trump's claim: "Other witnesses in Detroit also saw election officials counting batches of the same ballots many times as well as illegally duplicating ballots."

Trump's claim seems to be based on an affidavit filed by Melissa Carone who says she worked at TCF Center as a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software and hardware used by election officials in 28 states. Carone was also questioned by Giuliani during Wednesday's oversight meeting. In her affidavit, she claims that the tabulators at TCF were jammed four or five times an hour and that she witnessed workers running the ballots through the tabulator again, which she claims resulted in each ballot being counted four or five times. She recalled one instance in which she was called to assist an election worker dealing with a jam and noticed that the computer had scanned more than 400 ballots, "which means one batch was counted over 8 times," she wrote. "This happened countless times while I was at the TCF Center." If that happened, it would have been obvious during the canvassing process. Detroit precincts as well as the boards that counted absentee ballots had small discrepancies between the number of ballots counted and recorded as cast in the precinct poll book but nowhere near the discrepancies Carone's affidavit claims.

There's no basis to Trump's claim that ballots were "illegally" duplicated either. In Michigan, voters in the military, overseas or with certain disabilities are emailed ballots that clerks have to replicate into the correct ballot format in order to be properly read by the ballot counting machines. They are only counted once.

Trump's claim: "Another observer in Detroit gave sworn testimony that he saw countless invalid ballots that did not belong to properly registered voters and then witnessed election workers in Wayne County entering fake birth dates into the system in order to illegally count them."

This is false. Software used by election workers required entering a birth date for absentee ballots cast by voters whose date of birth was not available to election workers, according to Thomas' affidavit. Thomas wrote that the Jan. 1, 1900, birth date is a placeholder commonly used by election officials in Michigan that is assigned to voters whose eligibility to vote has been verified but who are not listed in the electronic poll book. Some voters' information was not in the poll book because it was downloaded Nov. 1. Voters, however, could vote absentee up to and including Election Day, under a 2018 ballot proposal approved by Michigan voters.

Trump's claim: Sworn affidavits testify that "after election officials announced the last absentee votes had been received, a batch of tens of thousands of ballots arrived, many without envelopes all voting for Democrats."

There is no evidence of wrongdoing. On Nov. 4, blank ballots were delivered to the TCF, according to a response from the legal team representing the city of Detroit in a lawsuit alleging fraud. The blank ballots were used to process ballots cast by members of the military and voters living overseas that have to be copied onto the correct ballot form in order to be counted.

Giuliani: Affidavits allege “massive cheating particularly on the part of the Democratic Party of Detroit to the extent of easily five, six seven-hundred thousand illegal votes calculated many different ways.” 

This is false and mathematically impossible. There is no evidence of election fraud in Detroit and allegations of fraud submitted by Republican challengers present at the TCF Center were rejected by Kenny as "incorrect and not credible" in the lawsuit against local election officials. The Trump campaign voluntarily withdrew a lawsuit it filed in the U.S. District Court in Michigan's Western District that included over 100 affidavits repeating many of the claims rejected by Kenny.

Meanwhile, the scale of fraud in Detroit alleged by Giuliani wildly exceeds the number of voters. In the November election, 256,514 votes were counted in Detroit.

Giuliani: “It was a very big surprise to me that our votes are sent out of the United States. It’s also a big surprise to me that our votes are counted by a foreign company.”

Giuliani falsely claimed that Dominion Voting Systems is a foreign company that processed Americans' votes overseas. Dominion is an American company based in Denver that does not have ties to Venezuela or maintain servers in Germany as Giuliani claimed. Ballots cast in the November election were processed and counted in the U.S. 

Giuliani: "We've had occasion to examine now the machine that faltered. We have preliminary data on how it can be inflated. We would need to examine the rest of the machines, and if we did we could probably tell you with some degree of certainty exactly how many votes were changed, the formula by which they were changed and if they were directed overseas."

Discussing Dominion once again, Giuliani claimed that the company’s software switched or deleted votes. There is no credible evidence to support that.

A human error that was found and corrected in Michigan's Antrim County is at the heart of this conspiracy theory. When the county initially transferred its election results to the state, they showed Biden winning. That baffled observers given that the county is a Republican stronghold. According to a timeline that Sheryl Guy, Antrim County's clerk, provided to the Senate Oversight Committee, soon after the county transmitted its unofficial results to the Bureau of Elections, the clerk's office became aware of the error early Nov. 4 and quickly began correcting the data. The county did not properly update the media drives on the tabulators, which led to the error when the unofficial results were transmitted from the tabulators to the county's central election management system software, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has said.  The clerk's staff began inputting the correct election results on the tabulator tapes by hand to correct the error, and the county's official results show Trump carried the county by 3,788 votes.

During a joint hearing held by the Senate and House oversight committees Nov. 19, Guy said, "I cannot express how very unfortunate it is that the human error has called into question the integrity of Antrim County’s election process and placed it front and center at the national level.” 

But the conspiracies about Dominion didn't end there. During a Senate Oversight meeting Tuesday, Patrick Colbeck, a former candidate for Michigan governor, said that data stored in Dominion's software defied logic, showing candidates receiving a fraction of a vote. Dominion has discredited the claim, explaining its software "does not have the ability to fractionalize or weight a vote."

Clara Hendrickson fact-checks Michigan issues and politics as a corps member with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Contact her at chendrickson@freepress.com or 313-296-5743 for comments or to suggest a fact check.