Trumps Highlights 2020 Michigan Voter-Fraud Scheme With 2026 Implications
The likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee will be in charge of her own election.
President Trump placed Michigan at the center of voter-fraud concerns in his Thursday night primetime speech. He cited a 2020 case — that shows similar problems could erupt there this November.
The issues have been known within the state’s election-integrity circles for years. But they reached the national stage last night, sending the mainstream media scrambling to get caught up.
As CNN noted in its “annotated transcript” of the speech: “Trump did declassify documents he said showed an influence campaign by China, a coverup by US intelligence officials and fraud in Michigan.”
With the world watching, Mr. Trump said, “Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter-registration operation in Michigan.”
He alleged massive fraud in a get-out-the-vote organization in Muskegon, where tens of thousands of people were registered to vote using false addresses. Many thousands of people registered gave their address as Muskegon High School. The registrations trace back to the Democrat-aligned company GBI Strategies.
Gateway Pundit broke the story in 2023; now it’s in White House archives.
Congressman John James, the Republican frontrunner in the Michigan governor’s race, responded to the speech immediately, linking the alleged fraud to the Democratic frontrunner.
“They rigged the election in 2020. Who was Secretary of State? Jocelyn Benson. Who’s managing the 2026 election? Jocelyn Benson,” he said on social media.
Michigan Fair Elections Institute has been monitoring election-integrity issues for years. Its members felt vindication seeing the president make public what they’d been talking about privately on Zoom calls. It described his address as “a speech many Americans have been waiting six years to hear.”
When Mr. Trump directed people to the White House website to see documents, there was so much interest that it crashed for a short time. “Even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up,” the site says.
“In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat get-out-the-vote organization in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found, that they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registrations for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to the number of applications they produced,” the site explains. “The FBI agents working on the case believed that crimes were committed — yet the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation for years.”
Michigan Democrats disputed Mr. Trump’s claims.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer said the state’s elections are “safe and secure — any suggestion otherwise is designed to undermine our voters’ basic rights.”
“Safe and secure” emerged as the party line among Democrats.
Ms. Benson, Michigan’s chief election officer, said Mr. Trump “can’t spread lies about an election you lost to try to interfere with the next one. Here in Michigan we know the truth — our elections are secure, safe and accurate.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel struck the same tone.
“The President has now spent an entire decade trying to convince you that our elections are unsecure and illegitimate. He is now just doing it from the most visible stage in the world: the White House,” she said.
On the eve of the 2020 election, Ms. Benson sent out letters to 700,000 “eligible but unregistered” adults in Michigan, inviting them to register to vote. “Eligible but unregistered” means adults with a driver’s license or state ID who are not registered to vote.
The problem: Michigan does not require proof of citizenship before registering an adult driver to vote. A foreign driver in Michigan would have to furnish proof of noncitizenship to not be registered to vote.
Ms. Benson got the list from the Electronic Registration Information Center, which she signed Michigan up for in January 2019, in her first week in office.
In theory, ERIC is meant to help Michigan and other member states cull their voter rolls of dead and duplicated voters. In reality, Michigan’s voter rolls have only grown fatter and are the most bloated in the nation.
If the ERIC data weren’t enough, one of her allies took things a step further.
ERIC founder David Becker heads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which in 2020 granted $12 million to Ms. Benson’s nonprofit, the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration.
Benson used this to produce and place ads featuring her own face, targeted to Democratic-leaning voters. The videos are still up on the group’s Facebook page.
The problem has only gotten worse over the years. Going into the 2024 election, Michigan had 400,000 more people registered to vote than it had adults.
Michigan’s voter-registration issues continue to this day. Just last month, Ms. Benson somehow found 173,000 new voters to register — in a state of 10 million whose population is stagnant and that registers drivers automatically.
With Ms. Benson set to run her own election for governor in Michigan, the question that was a whisper turns into a shout after the Trump press conference: How does the secretary of state continue to find hundreds of thousands of new voters to register in a state that’s not growing?
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