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Michigan Secretary of State @JocelynBenson announces that the recent statewide audit of the November 2020 election confirms that, indeed, Joe Biden won the election. (1/n)
The statewide risk-limiting audit—which election sec. experts recommend as one of the best ways to confirm the outcome of reflects the will of the voters—involved partisan and nonpartisan election officials from across the state hand-counting randomly selected ballots: (2/n)
Worth noting that the results line up with the machine-counted results across counties, even when different vendors' machines were in play: (3/n)
This is key given the claims from Trump and his associates that Dominion was part of a sprawling international plot to switch Trump votes for Biden. A claim that Dominion is suing multiple people over and claiming billions of dollars in damages. (4/n)
Benson has called for a range of election procedure reforms—both before and after the chaos of 2020—including the need for an audit like this to happen *prior to* election certification, which is not possible under current law. (5/n)
Other proposals include allowing local clerks to being processing mail-in ballots two weeks ahead of election day. Benson and others in MI have been calling for that change for more than a year, predicting that the delay in processing mail ballots could cause problems. (6/n)
This was also an issue in PA. If you'll remember, Trump and his associates claimed that election-night results were the true results without factoring in the mail ballots that took several days post-election to count. This was, indeed, a basis for "stolen election" claims. (7/n)
This issue was not taken seriously by senior Republicans in the Michigan legislature. State Sen. Mike Shirkey, the majority leader, curiously said in Feb. 2020 that this problem shouldn't be addressed before it occurs. (8/n) https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/02/20/gop-leader-mike-shirkey-opposes-absentee-ballot-bill/4818502002/
State Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican and former Secretary of State did recognize this as a problem and introduced a bill. It just didn't go anywhere for months. Instead of blaming her R colleagues, she blamed Benson: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/09/absentee-ballot-counting/ (9/n)
This reporting happened in a time when people were called cranks for pointing to Republican effort to hamstring election admin procedures as part of an overall Trump strategy to undermine confidence in elections in the event he lost, and cling to power however possible. (10/n)
And then what happened? Trump lost, immediately called the election fraudulent and stolen, and eventually whipped up enough fervor that a significant number of people *stormed the US Capitol*, beat police, got people killed. (11/n)
Let's also remember that election admin officials of all parties across the country faced death threats and other harassment as part of this, including Benson, who had armed people show up at her house while she was there with her child: (12/n) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michigan-protest-jocelyn-benson-secretary-of-state/
All of this is to say that today's announcement likely won't get the attention it deserves from the people who were the loudest about how Michigan's elections were fraudulent. (13/n)
There's a lot of work to do on the election security front, perhaps most important of all finding ways to provide evidence that elections are accurate. Not all people operate in good faith, obviously, but perhaps some can be persuaded by stuff like this audit. (14/14)
