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LAte last week, Ryan Fournier, founder of Students for Trump, said on social media he had unearthed definitive evidence of widespread election fraud in Detroit. He pointed to a postal vote cast by “William Bradley, 118,” a man who is believed to have died in 1984.
“They are trying to steal the election,” Fournier warned in a since deleted Facebook post, although the election had already been called for Joe Biden by all the major news networks a few days before.
But the late Bradley did not vote. Within days, Bradley’s son, also named William Bradley but with a different middle name, told PolitiFact he had voted. This was confirmed by Michigan election officials, who said a clerk listed the wrong Bradley as having voted. Although Bradley alive also received a mail-in ballot for his father, he said he threw it out, “because I didn’t want to confuse it with mine.”
The false claim that the late Bradley voted in the Nov. 3 election is part of a barrage of voter fraud conspiracy theories launched by Trump supporters across the country in recent weeks, and all have been debunked without prove that there are generalized irregularities.
Instead, theories often reveal the fundamental misconceptions of Trump supporters about the electoral system while creating a conspiracy theory game for election officials.
“We are confident that the Michigan election was fair, secure and transparent, and the results faithfully reflect the will of the people,” Secretary of State Spokeswoman Tracy Wimmer told The Guardian.
Bradley was just one of dozens of supposedly dead Michigan voters who turned out to be alive. Trump supporters have pointed out Jane Aiken of Napoleon Township, who they say was born in 1900, and cited an obituary as proof of her death. But the township deputy police chief investigated and found the obituary was for another Jane Aiken.
Police told Bridge Magazine that the Aiken who voted was “94 years old, alive and well. Very well, actually.
Meanwhile, CNN examined the files of 50 Michiganders who Trump supporters say are dead voters. They discovered that 37 had died and had not voted. Five are alive and have voted, and the other eight are also alive but did not vote.
The Michigan Secretary of State cited several reasons for confusion. Although election officials across the country purge the deceased from electoral rolls each year, some are missed and remain as registered voters. Sometimes a worker accidentally enters a vote by a living person as being cast by a deceased person with a similar name.
Michigan’s voting software also requires a birthday for each voter. If an employee does not have it, then 1/1/1901 is used as a placeholder until the employee can find the exact birthday. Right-wing conspiracy theorists have cited several examples of residents voting for the anniversary.
Among them was Donna Brydges, a 75-year-old resident of Hamlin Township. In a phone call with The Associated Press this week, she confirmed she was alive and passed the phone to her husband so he could do the same. He added: “She beat me in a game of cribbage.”
Michigan election officials, “are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast in the name of a deceased person,” the secretary of state wrote on his website.
Likewise, in Pennsylvania, Trump supporters like Representative Matt Gaetz claims 21,000 dead in the state “massively came to Biden.”
In fact, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a federal complaint on October 15 claiming that 21,000 dead were on the lists, and asked a judge to order their dismissal before the election. A judge found that more than half of the voters had already been removed from office, questioned PILF’s intentions and methodology, and failed to force the state to take action.
The theory of dead voters is just one of many conspiracies that Trump supporters have used to cast doubt on election results.
In Pennsylvania, a postal worker who said he heard a supervisor order staff to cancel late ballots retracted his claim after being visited by Postal Service investigators. In Arizona and Michigan, Trump supporters took legal action, claiming the votes were rejected because they used Sharpie markers to fill out their ballot, but quickly dropped it.
Several viral videos also claimed to reveal suspicious activity. In Detroit, Trump supporters claimed that a video showed someone bringing late mail in the ballots to a counting center. In fact, he was a cameraman from WXYZ Detroit roll your equipment in a wagon. Meanwhile, a video that Eric Trump said showed 80 Trump ballots were set on fire turned out to be false – the ballots were samples.
The Trump campaign has also claimed that recent federal prosecutions would prove widespread electoral fraud with hundreds of pages of testimony from poll watchers and challengers in Michigan. Almost all of them have failed in court so far.
Although Trump and his supporters have claimed that thousands of deceased people voted in Michigan, only one allegation was included in the lawsuits. Anita Chase, a resident of Warren, Mich., Wrote in an affidavit that her late son, Mark D Chase, who died in July 2016, was marked in the Secretary of State’s online voter tool as having voted in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.
But the secretary of state said Anita Chase had identified one of two other Mark D Chase registered to vote in Michigan – a ballot had not been cast in her son’s name. In their response to the affidavits, election officials in Detroit blasted the Trump campaign for such errors: “Most of the objections raised in the submitted affidavits are based on an extraordinary inability to understand how elections work.”
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