Left-wing election deniers want Vice President Kamala Harris to demand a recount in Michigan and other battleground states, but whether Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is on board is anyone’s guess.
“Under Michigan law, recounts can’t be requested until after the Board of State Canvassers certifies the election results. After that, candidates have 48 hours to request a recount,” Benson spokeswoman Angela Benander wrote in an email to The Midwesterner in response to an inquiry into whether the Secretary of State has received a recount request from Harris.
Benander clarified in a follow up email that “the deadline for state canvassers to certify is November 25,” but did not respond to two simple questions: “Does Secretary Benson believe Donald Trump won in Michigan?” and “Does Secretary Benson believe Vice President Harris should seek a recount in Michigan?”
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The silence from the state’s top election official on those basic questions stands in stark contrast to Benson’s comments to The Washington Post in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s resounding Nov. 5 win in the Great Lakes State.
“The will of the people will stand. Whatever it is,” said Benson, a former hate crimes investigator for the Southern Poverty Law Center who’s expected to run her own election for governor in 2026.
In a six-page letter to Harris last week, 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,” despite zero evidence of fraud.
“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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Trump prevailed over Harris in the electoral college 312-226, and won the popular vote by about 2.5 million ballots. The outcome shifted control of the U.S. Senate to Republicans, who held on to their majority in the lower chamber.
Nevertheless, 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.
“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,” Free Speech For People’s letter read. “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.”
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Ironically, the nonprofit legal group’s efforts to challenge the 2024 election follow a years-long vendetta against Trump that aimed to frame the 47th POTUS as an “election denier” and his concerns about 2020 as “the big lie.”
The vendetta also involved demands for Trump’s impeachment before he was even inaugurated in 2017, pushing for New York to dissolve the Trump Organization, and lawsuits in Michigan, Oregon, and Colorado to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot.
The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided in March that only Congress, not states, could make that decision.
But the vendetta lives on, with Free Speech For People resurrecting it’s claims about a “multistate conspiracy to copy voting software” that was previously dismissed by federal officials in 2022, The Daily Signal reports.
Whether Harris or Benson buy in remains to be seen.
Neither Free Speech For People nor Harris’ office responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal, while Benander made it clear Benson isn’t interested in discussing the issue.