Catherine Rusoff
When a board of canvassers in small Delta County, Michigan, refused to certify local election results for a county commission race last week, the challenging decision raised concerns among election experts and officials about where the 2024 campaign could go. arrive in November.
“Anyone seeing this latest incident in Delta County should be incredibly alarmed,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who has led legal efforts against election conspiracy activists across the country. “We all need to take incidents like this seriously and see them as a warning for what we will almost certainly see this fall.”
The local vote, which was eventually certified under pressure from state authorities, attracted little outside attention. But some election experts believe there will be efforts to replicate Delta County’s denial of certification.
“All of these tactics are designed to paralyze election administration systems across the country in an effort to force them to fail and undermine voter confidence in the process,” said Kim Rogers, executive director of the State and Local Election Alliance. “These anti-democracy groups are taking these measures because they want to discredit the elections if they lose.”
Doubts about fraud or cheating in the American elections arose during the 2020 campaign and have continued to grow despite the lack of any evidence to support them. A CBS News Poll of Arizona voters released Monday found that about half of former President Donald Trump’s current voters now say they would like to challenge the results if he loses.
The potential for disputes has grown along with these doubts.
Delta County is a rural, conservative part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that has consistently voted for Trump. The decision to suspend local election certification last week was fueled by outside election conspiracy activist groups, local officials told CBS News. Since February 2023, a group called Citizens for Electoral Justice has been involved in discussions with Republican officials in Delta County, including the canvasser who refused to verify. Members of the organization have expressed concerns about the accuracy of votes counted at local election machines.
In a photo posted on a community Facebook page, a group called Delta County Citizens said it was working closely with two organizations that had raised concerns about “suspicious voting rates” that “warrant further investigation,” including the Force of Electoral Integrity and Citizens for Electoral Justice. The groups advocated “a manual recount and a forensic audit of the results,” the complaint shows.
Nancy Przewrocki, the Delta County clerk who administered the election, told CBS News that there were no voting irregularities in this low-turnout local recall election, with just 4,550 votes cast.
“We match the number of voters to the number of ballots, to the number of ballots counted by the tabulators — all numbers match 100%,” she said.
Przewrocki, a Republican, has administered elections for more than 23 years and says she is concerned about the precedent this denial of certification could set.
“This is absolutely about November, about preparing for what might happen then,” she said. “If the vote doesn’t go the way they want, it won’t be a good situation. They will encounter the same problems with certifying the elections in November as they do now.”
Przewrocki said he first realized there was a problem when he heard about the local canvassing board, which is made up of two Republicans and two Democrats.
Last Tuesday, the four colporteurs met at the Escanaba courthouse to certify the results. Republican canvasser Bonnie Hakkola announced to the group that she would not certify, based on her concerns about how the election had been conducted. She and the other Republican canvasser, an alternative canvasser she was filling in for that day, blocked an election certification for the first time in the county’s history.
John Myers, one of the Democratic canvassers, said he was surprised.
“Our job is just to see if the poll workers signed, if the seals were registered accurately,” he said. “We match the total number of voters to the number of ballots that go through the machine.”
Myers, who has been a canvasser for more than 14 years, said certification depends on the total number of votes cast equaling the total number of voters — which he said occurred in this election. He said he thought the entire process would take 10 minutes.
Video of the session is not available because colportage sessions are not recorded. But Hakkola, vice chairman of the First District Republican Party, has made several conspiracy-laden public statements expressing concerns about the reliability of voting machines.
“I’m saying there is fraud inherent in elections, it’s in the machinery,” Hakkola said at a County Commission meeting earlier this year. “A lot of our agencies are infiltrated every day, so there’s a lot of fraud … in Michigan and Wisconsin.”
Hakkola could not be reached for comment.
Scott Aughney of Citizens for Electoral Justice told CBS News he has been in contact with Delta County officials for more than a year. He says Delta County officials initiated contact with his organization prior to certification.
Aughney and his group have been meeting with local Republican Party members, law enforcement officials and election administrators in Michigan counties.
“It’s not about Donald Trump anymore,” said Aughney, who lives in Jackson County, 400 miles from Delta, and is currently running for sheriff.
Pressuring local officials to cast doubt on the voting process is part of a national strategy, says Rogers, a democracy strategist and election advocate. “These groups are working to undermine public confidence in our elections,” Rogers said. “And ultimately, our ability to respond to this threat will change the direction of this country.”
Those who administer elections continue to be under increasing pressure from outside groups and some citizens.
County Clerk Przewrocki says groups are pressuring her to release voter roll data that contains protected personal information, which the state says is illegal to distribute publicly.
“County officials are caught between this group and the Secretary of State’s office,” she said. “It’s a difficult situation to be in.”
Two days after canvassers refused to certify the local vote, the secretary of state’s office sent the Delta County Clerk’s Office a letter informing it of the consequences if the vote was not certified.
“The Michigan Constitution and Election Law do not authorize county boards of canvassers to refuse to certify election results based on allegations made by third parties about alleged election irregularities or a general desire to conduct election investigations,” the letter says . Lack of certification would mean the clerk would have to personally deliver all records, including ballots and voting machines, to Michigan state canvassers — all at the county’s expense. The price, the letter adds, will be “expansive.”
The letter was signed by Jonathan Brater, elections director and secretary of the Board of State Canvassers.
In a quickly rescheduled follow-up vote on Friday night, canvassers voted to certify the vote, with three votes in favor and Hakkola abstaining.
