Michigan House committee hears testimony alleging state voter‑file errors, duplicate votes and missing records

At a hearing of the Michigan House Committee on Election Integrity, Tim Vetter and Braden Jacobasi of the Michigan Fair Elections Institute testified that inconsistencies across local, county and statewide election data files have produced unexplained changes to vote history records, split or reaggregated precinct results and apparent duplicate votes.

Jacobasi, introduced to the committee as a member of the Data Evaluation of Election Processes team at Michigan Fair Elections, summarized the group’s view of a “world class” election data system and said Michigan’s systems fall short. "If somebody offers you half of a file and claims that it's the whole thing, then you think that you're getting something that you're not," Jacobasi said. He added that public records should be “real time records that are accessible to the public at no cost.”

Vetter, who described vote history records as analogous to bank transaction logs, told the committee that vote history entries “should never change” and presented six categories of changes his group has documented, including: vote history records added after county certification, vote method switching (for example from in‑person to absentee) after certification, vote records transferred from one voter ID to another, vote locations moved between jurisdictions, duplicated vote history entries, and vote history records removed. He said the group has tracked both additions…