Far-left election deniers want Vice President Kamala Harris to request a recount of the Nov. 5 election results in Michigan and other battleground states, despite zero evidence of fraud.
In a six-page letter to Harris on Thursday, activists with Free Speech for People alleged “serious election security breaches … threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections,” and called on the VP to “formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.”
“We have no evidence that the outcomes of the elections in those states were actually compromised as a result of the security breaches, and we are not suggesting that they were,” the letter read. “But binding risk-limiting audits (RLAs) or hand recounts should be routine for all elections, especially when the stakes are high and the results are close.”
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According to The Associated Press, President-elect Donald Trump prevailed over Harris in the electoral college 312-226, while also winning the popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes.
The election outcome also shifted control of the U.S. Senate to Republicans, while maintaining the GOP’s majority in the lower chamber.
But Free Speech For People alleges operatives hired by Trump in the wake of his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden accessed voting software in Georgia in 2022 that “enables bad actors to install it on electronic devices and to create their own working replicas of the voting systems, probe them, and develop exploits.”
Attorneys affiliated with Trump obtained voting machine information through court actions, although there’s no evidence it was used or obtained by bad actors.
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“Audits will be conducted in some of the most scrutinized states, but in key states they will not be conducted in a timely way that could reveal any concerns with the vote count,” the letter read.
“Among swing states, only Arizona’s audit laws ensure that, if enough discrepancies are identified, the audit hand count will be expanded to correct a potentially incorrect result,” it continued. “In other words, aside from Arizona, in contested states, there is no legal mechanism for the audit to correct the outcome, no matter how much error the audit uncovers. Given these facts, the only guarantee for rigorous, effective audits of the vote in the swing states will be through candidate-requested statewide hand recounts.”
Free Speech For People first pushed for federal officials to investigate what it described as a “multistate conspiracy to copy voting software” in December 2022, but were unsuccessful, The Daily Signal reports.
The request followed other efforts by the nonprofit legal group to frame Trump as an “election denier” and the 45th POTUS’ concerns about 2020 as “the big lie.”
Prior to that, Free Speech For People’s vendetta against Trump included calling for his impeachment before he was even inaugurated in 2017, pushing for New York to dissolve the Trump Organization, and lawsuits in Michigan, Oregon, and Colorado seeking to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot.
Angela Benander, spokeswoman for Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, belatedly responded to an email from The Midwesterner about whether the Harris campaign has requested a recount, but didn’t answer the question posed.
“Under Michigan law, recounts can’t be requested until after the Board of State Canvassers certifies the election results,” Benander said in an email. “After that, candidates have 48 hours to request a recount.”
Wayne State University law professor Jennifer Taub, who is listed as a member of Free Speech For People’s legal advisory committee, did not respond to The Midwesterner’s request for a comment.
Neither Free Speech For People nor Harris’ office responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
Free Speech For People penned a 20-page letter to Benson in July 2023 laying out the case for Benson’s “authority and responsibility to determine, as part of the state ballot qualification process, whether a candidate for office is ineligible to appear on the Michigan presidential primary ballot…”
Benson, a former hate crimes investigator for the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center who is angling to replace Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2026, wrote in an editorial for The Washington Post two months later “the appropriate forum for deciding whether a candidate qualifies to serve in office under the Constitution is the courts – and, in a case with national implications such as this one, the Supreme Court.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided on March 4 that only Congress, not states, could disqualify Trump from the ballot.