Donald Trump lost Michigan by more than 150,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election. But the state still featured prominently in the false claims of election fraud pushed by Trump and his allies.
Two days after the election, Trump addressed the nation and delivered a litany of inaccurate allegations about vote-counting in Michigan. “We were way up in Michigan, won the state, and that got whittled down,” Trump said. Without evidence, Trump accused Michigan poll workers of “duplicating ballots”, producing illegal “batches” of votes at 4am, and tallying “more votes than you had voters”.
On 19 November 2020, the Associated Press reported, Trump “summoned Michigan’s Republican legislative leaders to the White House for an extraordinary meeting” as part of a “GOP push to subvert the democratic process”. Trump also filed lawsuits and personally lobbied two Republican officials in Michigan’s Wayne county to refuse to certify the results.
While Trump’s claims lacked factual support, he had plenty of political support from Michigan legislators. On 16 November 2020, 41 Republican members of the Michigan legislature signed a letter to Michigan’s secretary of state demanding “a full, independent audit of the recent election prior to the certification of results” due to “serious allegations ... which cannot and should not be ignored”. The letter regurgitates a laundry list of Trump’s baseless claims, including allegations that election officials “counted ineligible ballots; counted...
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