The Op-Ed Piece the Detroit Free Press Wouldn't Print
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DFP Editors don't want their readers to hear anything negative about Benson's 2024 audit
Image Credit: The Midwesterner/Esteban Clark-Braendle
By Patrice Johnson, MFEI Founder and Chair
October 22, 2025
The Michigan Bureau of Elections’ recent post-election audit report delivers excellent news: Michigan counts ballots with 99.97% accuracy. Our election workers deserve recognition for this achievement.
But imagine a bank auditor who verifies that tellers count money flawlessly—yet never checks whether the deposits came from legitimate accounts, whether signatures on checks matched account holders, or whether the bank maintained its customer records according to federal law. And what if the auditor turned out to be the bank teller? We’d call that audit incomplete and suspect, no matter how accurate the counting proved to be.
Michigan’s election audit suffers the same limitations. It confirmed we count ballots correctly — a crucial piece of the election integrity puzzle — but left the other pieces unexamined.
The missing pieces tell a concerning story.
Detroit, where the Michigan Fair Elections Institute found the state’s highest verification challenges (57.14% indeterminate residency among long-inactive registrations), appears conspicuously absent from the SOS’s audit sampling. Troy is missing too. Risk-based audit methodology demands explicit focus on the highest-risk areas.
The audit never verified whether signatures on 2,081,265 mail-in ballots — more than one-third of all votes cast — matched voter registration records. This critical fraud safeguard went unchecked entirely.
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office selected which precincts to audit and then announced that those audits confirmed their accuracy. However unintentional, this creates the appearance of grading one’s own homework — a structural weakness that independent oversight could easily remedy.
Michigan law requires voting systems to meet certification standards under MCL 168.795a, but the certification process itself lacks transparency. University of Michigan computer scientist Professor Alex Halderman’s analysis identified four significant flaws in Michigan’s deployed equipment, including malware risks that could alter vote totals without detection. Proprietary source code remains hidden from audit scrutiny.
Most troubling, the audit ignored whether Michigan’s voter registration databases comply with federal accuracy requirements.
Our independent analysis reveals why this matters.
The Michigan Fair Elections Institute conducted a statistically rigorous examination of 384 randomly sampled registrations from Michigan’s 542,121 voters inactive since 2019 or earlier (95% confidence, 5% margin of error). Our Ensuring Electoral Integrity report documents what we found.
More than one in four registrations (27.6%) contained exceptions: deceased voters (21,141 scaled statewide), out-of-state dual registrations (53,702), invalid addresses (4,225). Nearly three-quarters either never voted or last voted before 2010—totaling 398,121 inactive registrations statewide.
Michigan maintains 558,627 voters inactive since 2019 or earlier—exceeding the National Voter Registration Act’s four-year maximum by 375%. We mailed confirmation letters to verify residency, and 9.11% were returned as undeliverable.
Our comprehensive MFEI Investigation into Michigan Elections suggests Michigan carries approximately 800,000 potentially ineligible registrations. We documented systematic alterations to voter history records months after certification, and we found 82,467 voter IDs temporarily linked to duplicate votes in October 2024 (a “glitch”). Then premature destruction of electronic pollbook data occurred despite federal requirements for 22-month retention.
These findings complement rather than contradict the state’s audit results. Just as financial audits examine both accurate recording and legitimate transactions, election integrity requires examining both accurate counting and eligible voting. All the puzzle pieces, need to fit correctly together, not just one.
Michigan can complete the puzzle.
The Supreme Court’s Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute ruling in 2018 affirmed states’ obligation to remove long-inactive registrations. Michigan should systematically clean up its 558,627 voters inactive since 2019 or earlier, bringing practices into federal compliance.
We must enforce the federal mandate for 22-month record retention, enabling genuine public oversight and clerk authority.
Independent computer scientists should examine voting equipment source code, as federal cybersecurity experts recommend, to verify whether Michigan’s certification process adequately protects against identified vulnerabilities.
Michigan needs systematic and independent confirmation of mail-in ballot signatures.
Future audits should let bipartisan observers, not the audited agency itself, select precincts through transparent protocols that explicitly prioritize high-risk jurisdictions like Detroit.
Finally, Michigan should apply the same statistical rigor that verified our 99.97% ballot counting accuracy to examining voter registration database accuracy, potentially through independent federal review under the Help America Vote Act and National Voter Registration Act.
Michigan excels at counting ballots—one crucial piece completed with exceptional precision. The other pieces await our commitment: accurate voter rolls, federal law compliance, transparent certification, verified signatures, independent oversight, and comprehensive statistical rigor. Each piece strengthens the whole. Together, they complete the picture of election integrity that serves every Michigan voter.
Patrice Johnson chairs Michigan Fair Elections Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to election integrity. Reports available at mifairelections.org/library.
