With no congressional approval or constitutional authority, Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson made the unilateral decision to mail absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million addresses in Michigan, hiding behind the Chinese pandemic as an excuse. Local media outlets in Michigan claimed that Benson mailed the ballots to qualified voters, but that claim is not accurate, as 17-year-olds (the voting age in Michigan is 18-yrs.-old), dead people, foreign students who no longer live in the United States, and people who have moved from Michigan to another state, also received absentee ballot applications.
In September 2020, Benson revealed that 500,000 of the 7.7 million unsolicited absentee ballot applications had been returned between May and August. The far-left MI Secretary of State told the Detroit News that she would perform voter list “maintenance” after the November 3 election, citing federal law that prohibits list maintenance 90 days before an election. Why did Benson, who’s been in office since January 1, 2019, choose the month of May to begin mailing the absentee ballot applications to “qualified” voters? Was Benson’s plan to time the mailings so that federal law would prevent her from removing the names of ineligible voters before the November election?
In June, conservative activist and director of the Michigan Freedom Fund, Tony Daunt, filed a lawsuit to force Secretary of State Benson to clean up the voter rolls. Daunt claims that his lawsuit was the reason Benson was forced to remove 177,000 names from the Michigan voter rolls.
Why did Benson remove only 177,000 names from her voter rolls last week, when in September, Benson reported that an estimated 500,000 of the 7.7 million unsolicited ballot applications were returned because the recipients had either died or moved?
As a reminder…President Trump lost the state of Michigan by approximately 157,000 votes.
According to the Detroit News – Former Secretary of State Ruth Johnson argued that Secretary Benson should not have sent applications to people on the “inactive” or “countdown” list — a list of people believed to have moved but required by federal law to stay on the Qualified Voter File for at least two federal election cycles to verify their departure from the state. At the least, the Republican lawmaker said, those individuals should have been sent postcards instead of the actual ballot application.
In a letter dated September 5, Jocelyn Benson told former Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, who is now a Michigan State Senator, that the Michigan Bureau of Elections would sort through the 500,000 returned applications and distribute them to local clerks for voter list maintenance.
Benson, who’s possibly the most dishonest Secretary of State in Michigan history, continues to claim she has performed “the most transparent list cleanup in a decade,” but is she telling the truth?
We spoke with a deputy city clerk who asked to not be identified over the fear of retribution, who explained to us that there are only two times that city clerks have the authority to remove names from voter rolls. The first reason a clerk can remove a voter from their rolls is if they determine a voter in their district has died. The second reason a city clerk is able to remove a voter is if they receive a signed letter or statement stating that the voter has moved.
Yesterday, we reported about a Rochester Hills, MI resident who told us that for the first time ever, he received absentee ballot applications at his home for two ineligible voters. The first absentee ballot application they received was for Ms. Lee, a former foreign college student, and friend who was never a U.S. citizen and only briefly lived in Michigan. Ms. Lee moved back to Taiwan after finishing her education at Oakland University between 2004-2005. According to the homeowner whose wife is friends with the foreign student, Ms. Lee has not returned to the United States since returning back home to Taiwan. Apparently, Jocelyn Benson and several voting groups didn’t care if Ms. Lee was a citizen, or even if she lived in the state of Michigan, they still wanted Ms. Lee to vote in the November 2020 election. According to the homeowner, Ms. Lee not only received an absentee voter ballot application from the MI Sec of State, but she also received several requests from third-party groups that offered to assist the Taiwan resident so she could safely vote by mail in the November 2020 election.
The Rochester Hills resident also got an absentee ballot application for Mr. Yee, a friend who temporarily lived with him and his wife but moved out of state in 2005. The homeowner told us that the 2020 absentee voter application from Secretary of State Benson was the first piece of election-related mail they’ve received at their address.
It’s curious that after 15 years, the first time the state of Michigan reached out to the temporary resident who hasn’t voted in the state of Michigan for at least 15 years was asking him to vote by mail in the November election. It’s also curious that Benson admitted that 500,000 absentee ballot applications were returned in September, yet only 177,000 names have been removed by her from the voter rolls, and only after she was sued, essentially forcing her to clean up the rolls.
For the record, we have verified that neither of the names of the ineligible voters who received absentee ballot applications at the Rochester Hills home were removed from the list as part of the so-called purge of 177,000 ineligible voters by Benson last week.
