Yesterday The Epoch Times posted a first-hand account of some events that took place during ballot processing in Wayne County Michigan.
The article reports:
A Republican poll watcher who filed a lawsuit over suspected election fraud described a “pattern of intimidation and bullying” as he and others tried to monitor the ballot processing in Wayne County, the largest in the battleground state of Michigan.
A group of “extremely confrontational” poll observers “constantly” accosted the Republican watchers, hindering their ability to focus on observing the ballot count and checking for errors, Edward McCall told The Epoch Times.
“It was constant; it was unbelievable. The level of hostility and distraction, and just asking questions and staring at me from a couple of feet away … it was shocking,” he said in an interview.
McCall is one of two plaintiffs in a Nov. 9 lawsuit (pdf) alleging “numerous issues of fraud and misconduct” at the TCF Center in downtown Detroit, the facility that counts all the absentee ballots for Wayne County. McCall worked as a poll watcher there from Nov. 2 to Nov. 4.
On Nov. 3 and Nov. 4, poll workers “would hold papers in such a way as to block out view of the ballots,” McCall wrote in an affidavit seen by The Epoch Times.
Please understand that the affidavits signed by witnesses are legal documents. Saying something untrue on them can result in being charged with perjury and arrested. This is serious.
The article concludes:
McCall counted 24 instances of ballot problems during his shift on Nov. 2. At least 15 ballots came with handwritten ballot numbers on the outer envelope that didn’t match the electronic poll book; one ballot was marked with the wrong date on the envelope; and some ballot forms weren’t filled out properly, but the checkers counted them without review, he said. Further, processed ballots were placed in a satchel atop a metal box containing ballots that require scanning. Workers could mistakenly miss the box or double-count ballots by accident, he said.
The workload also varied greatly across tables. While workers at McCall’s table had only 20 ballots on election night and basically sat around afterwards, others received as many as 2,000, causing them to speed through the process and potentially brush off any challenges as being disruptive, he said.
David Fink, an attorney for the City of Detroit Mayor’s Office, has dismissed both litigations as “baseless.” Spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State Jake Rollow called the Trump lawsuit “the same kind of irresponsible false rhetoric and misinformation that we saw throughout the election,” and maintained that “Michigan’s elections were conducted fairly, securely, transparently.”
But McCall argued that dismissing the allegations without considering the details is “a panacea”—“an overarching statement that does not reflect the facts on the ground.”
Dozens of Republican poll challengers have approached McCall over their treatment at the venue, he said.
“We owe it to the rest of the country to have a more transparent and more streamlined ballot processing here in Michigan, especially in Wayne County,” he said.
Stay tuned.