Michigan Issues Non-Denial Denial Of Dead Voter Rolls Claim

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Nov. 06, 2020

Michigan's Department of State on Thursday issued a non-denial denial of the reports that dead people are listed as having voted on Michigan's voting status database.


Here's the statement they sent out:
Ballots of voters who have died are rejected in Michigan, even if the voter cast an absentee ballot and then died before Election Day. On rare occasions, a ballot received for a living voter may be recorded in a way that makes it appear as if the voter is dead. This can be because of voters with similar names, where the ballot is accidentally recorded as voted by John Smith Sr when it was actually voted by John Smith Jr; or because of inaccurately recorded birth dates in the qualified voter file; for example, someone born in 1990 accidentally recorded as born in 1890. In such scenarios, no one ineligible has actually voted, and there is no impact on the outcome of the election. Local clerks can correct the issue when it is brought to their attention.
Note the non-denial that dead people are on the rolls and voted.

Instead, they just describe how the system is supposed to work, which everyone already knows.

They left it to the media to fill in the blanks for them.

For example, Snopes wrote an article titled, "RUMOR ALERT: William Bradley and ‘Dead’ Voters in Michigan" with the subheader, "More evidence is required before this claim can be rated in a traditional Snopes fact check, but official sources have refuted it."



Refute can mean "prove that (someone) is wrong" or "deny or contradict (a statement or accusation)," Snopes no doubt wants readers to believe they did the former, when at most one might say they did the latter.

Business Insider ran an article titled, "Michigan says a 'dead voter' conspiracy theory shared by Donald Trump Jr. is probably the result of a records error."



The article itself falsely claimed only one deceased person was listed as having voted, then cited ex-CIA Director and ex-Communist John Brennan's Brennan Center to pooh-pooh the notion that voter fraud exists (the Brennan Center simultaneously claims Russia has "interfered in our election," including through "voter suppression").

From Business Insider:
Michigan's Department of State denied a viral conspiracy theory alleging that a deceased person voted in the 2020 presidential election. 

The theory, popularized by conservative social-media personality Austen Fletcher (@Fleccas), claims that a Michigan man named William Bradley, who died in 1984, voted in Wayne County, Michigan. The tweet, posted early on Thursday morning, was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. and has amassed more than 50,000 retweets by Thursday evening.
The claim is that multiple dead voters were listed on Michigan's voting status database website as having voted.

One was listed as 118 years old, another was 119 years old and another was 120 years old.





To claim it was just one person is pure strawmanning and misinformation.
Jake Rollow, the director of communications for the Michigan Department of State, told Insider in an email that ballots of dead voters are rejected by the state, but that "on rare occasions, a ballot received for a living voter may be recorded in a way that makes it appear as if the voter is dead." 

The Michigan Department of State also replied directly to Fletcher's tweet, calling the claim misinformation. Twitter did not label the tweet as misinformation, as it has with several false election claims, but did add a flag for users to learn about how "voting by mail is safe and secure." 

 

Michigan Department of State's voter index does appear to show that a William Bradley, who was born in 1902, voted by mail in the presidential election, Insider found. According to Michigan Residents Database, a people-search website that uses data from the state's public records, the voter status of a 118-year-old William Bradley has been challenged. Insider was not able to verify claims that a William Bradley died in 1984. 

There are two explanations for the deceased William Bradley's ballot mistakenly appearing on Michigan's voter index, according to Rollow — neither of which constitute voter fraud. 

The explanation that seems most likely is that the program yielded search results for the wrong William Bradley, making a living person's vote appear with the voting records of a dead person of the same name.  

RocketReach, a contact information index for professionals, shows that there are two William Bradleys living in the Detroit area. Neither man immediately responded to emails from Insider asking if they had voted in the election. Spokeo, a search program that aggregates public online information about people, also yielded a Detroit-area William Bradley, but phone numbers associated with that person were not in service. 

A ballot may also show up as a dead voter if the ballot is recorded with incorrect birth dates, such as 1890 being swapped with 1990, Rollow said. 

A 2007 voter fraud report from New York University's Brennan Center For Justice, a public policy think tank, noted that there are only a "handful" of documented cases where it appears that a dead person's name has actually been used to cast a vote. The report went on to say that record mismatches, such as those referenced by Rollow, are often to blame. A 2007 evaluation of 100 "dead voters" found that every instance was the result of a data, clerical, or matching error, according to the report. [Emphasis added]
If you can't trust the ex-Communist former Director of the CIA who authorized drone strikes on American citizens, who can you trust, folks?!

Lists of additional suspected dead voters are being run through their system and compiled as we speak.


That the Michigan officials are not denying it outright may be a sign that where there's smoke there's fire.

Follow InformationLiberation on Twitter, Facebook, Gab and Minds.












All original InformationLiberation articles CC 4.0



About - Privacy Policy