Michigan’s attorney general is rejecting an effort by the US Justice Department to obtain ballots and other voting materials from the Detroit area, a target of the Trump administration’s efforts to probe elections in states that the president falsely claims he won in 2020.
Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, sent a letter to the clerk who oversees elections in Wayne County, Michigan’s most populous, on Tuesday, requesting she turn over all ballots, ballot receipts and ballot envelopes from the 2024 election within two weeks.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel responded on Friday, calling President Donald Trump and his allies’ claims of widespread voter fraud “baseless” and warning that state leaders stand “ready to defend against these claims and any attempt to interfere in Michigan’s elections.”
Federal prosecutors want to ensure that ballots from the last presidential election are legally valid because of Wayne County’s “history,” Dhillon explains.
However, several of her allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election stem from a Michigan case that courts repeatedly rejected, citing a lack of credibility in the plaintiffs’ claims about operations at Detroit’s downtown ballot-counting center — an epicenter of conspiracy theories.
Nessel emphasized that federal, state and local officials have repeatedly found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Michigan, calling the few cases that her office prosecuted related to the 2020 election “infinitesimal” compared to the total number of voters in Wayne County.
In her letter to Dhillon, Nessel repudiated the basis of DOJ’s efforts, arguing that “speculative evidence of election fraud” does not meet the standard required to compel states to turnover ballots and that it is too broad in scope.
CNN has reached out to the Justice Department about Nessel’s letter.
Michigan’s elections are largely administered by local clerks who report voting data to the county. Nessel contends that the 43 clerks throughout Wayne County who retain ballots from 2024 should not have to respond to a request related to allegations outside of their jurisdiction.
“Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy,” Nessel wrote, vowing to do everything in her power to protect the “fundamental right to vote” in Michigan.
Michigan is just the latest state that the Trump administration has focused in on in its efforts to probe old ballots from battleground states, sparking concerns about how far they will go in policing future elections.
The FBI seized 2020 ballots from a Fulton County, Georgia elections center in January, years after Trump pressured then-Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in that state.
In the ensuing legal battle, a lawyer for Fulton County warned a federal judge last month that if he did not scrutinize the criminal search warrant used to obtain 2020 Atlanta-area election records, it could embolden the Trump administration to seize ballots in the midst of an election in the future.
The president has already suggested that the federal government could get “involved” in counting votes if he doesn’t believe states are doing their constitutional duty of administering elections adequately.
