Election Watchdog Says System Allowed 600 Duplicate Absentee Ballots in Michigan

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL – An election watchdog in Michigan identified more than 600 cases of absentee ballots that were sent to the same voters at least twice.

Check My Vote shared the information with the Daily Signal from a statewide analysis, finding 668 ballots sent twice to people with the same name and the same voter ID number as of Oct. 1. In almost all cases, the individuals also had the same address.

Of those, the organization found six cases of what appear to be the same person returning two ballots.

Michigan is home to one of the most closely contested U.S. Senate races in the country, with Republican Mike Rogers facing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

Sending more than one ballot creates an avenue for fraud, even if rare, said Phani Mantravadi, founder and president of Check My Vote, who has worked with local election clerks and state lawmakers, and testified before the state legislature.

“I look at duplicate ballots the same way I look at noncitizen registrations,” Mantravadi, an IT developer who focuses on data, told the Daily Signal. “People might say there are just one or two. But it’s a systemic problem. The system allows it, and the system needs to be fixed. Elections are the heart of the nation.”

The Check My Vote information shows the overwhelmingly largest number of duplicate ballots, 635, went to voters in the city of Hancock, a small town of just 4,600 people. Detroit was a distant second,

Hancock Deputy City Clerk Tara Dulong said Friday she did not have time to look at all the names because the office is busy preparing for the election. She told the Daily Signal of those she looked at, “It doesn’t really match what I saw.”

Dulong also said she didn’t see any examples of duplicate votes being returned.

Local elections are particularly susceptible to errors or fraud, Mantravadi noted.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which keeps a database of close elections, found 11 local elections in Michigan that were either tied or decided by a single vote.

“A council member or a school board member in races sometimes decided by 10 or 20 votes doesn’t have the resources to investigate fraud,” Mantravadi said.

Check My Vote gets the election data through Freedom of Information Act requests from the Michigan Bureau of Elections.

Mantravadi said the local election clerks are responsible for sending the ballots. But, he said, he doesn’t blame the clerks because the secretary of state’s office frequently sends names that local offices sometimes lack the resources to verify.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office did not respond to inquiries for this story. Neither the campaigns of Rogers nor El-Sayed responded.

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