Two weeks before the 2020 election, a woman dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms with a city clerk in Muskegon, Michigan.
The number of forms was a red flag for the city clerk, Ann Meisch. Less than 4,000 of the city’s voting-age residents weren’t registered to vote.
Ms. Meisch called the police, triggering an investigation by the Michigan State Police. An Oct. 26, 2020, police report from that probe recently surfaced after Michigan state lawmakers obtained it through a Freedom of Information request.
At the time, Brianna Hawkins, the woman who delivered the forms, was employed by GBI Strategies, an out-of-state firm working to boost Democrat voter turnout in urban centers in key swing states to help then-candidate Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump. According to the police report, when questioned by Muskegon Police Department investigators, Ms. Hawkins said her job was to register voters and help them obtain absentee ballots.
State Republican Party officials Phil O’Halloran and Lori Skibo obtained the police report. Mr. O’Halloran provided it to The Epoch Times.
An article by a nationally known fact-checking service disputed recent conservative media accounts of the Muskegon episode.
“While the total number of voter registration forms submitted by that person may add up to as much as 12,500, very few of them were deemed to be fraudulent,” the fact checker said.
“Page 3 of the MSP [Michigan State Police] report says Meisch ‘turned over 42 suspected fraudulent applications to Officer Foster [of the Muskegon Police Department] for examination.’”
The fact checker didn’t state that the 42 applications were a sampling.
Checking the Fact-checkers
However, the numbers tell a different story and raise a question: If there were only 42 suspected fraudulent voter registration applications submitted to the city clerk, why didn’t she register the rest of the batch?
In 2020, the population of the City of Muskegon was 38,309, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Of these, 29,800 people were of voting age.
Ms. Meisch told The Epoch Times in an August 10 email that in 2019, there were 25,957 registered voters in the city. In 2020, the number of people registered to vote increased by 2,077 to 28,034.
That means the pool of voting-age people not registered to vote that Ms. Hawkins had to work with was only 3,843.
Ms. Hawkins dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms in incremental batches, suggesting that thousands of the forms never made it onto the city’s registered voter roll.
“Even a casual observer can readily see that something is wrong. The numbers do not add up. The number of registration forms turned in by one person represents a third of the population of the city,” Mr. O’Halloran told The Epoch Times.
By Steven Kovac
