A guide for PD’s and EC members
Part One
Now that the District Caucuses, State and even County Conventions are done for the year, maybe it’s time we step back in this “off season” and take a hard look at how we’re running the elections in those events?
Inside the TCF Center at the 2025 State Convention on Feb. 22nd.
This first of two parts will focus on the State Convention, held on February 22nd, 2025. Part Two will take a look at counting strategies for county conventions and district caucuses. The principles can also apply to certain executive and state committee elections as well. First, I’d like to make an observation: the Caucuses and Convention on February 21st and 22nd in Detroit ran reasonably well, on the surface. But there are deeper problems with these processes that date back to when I began as a precinct delegate (don’t ask, please!) and these bear careful scrutiny and must be improved. We all need to start looking at “best practices” and working on developing standards of excellence in how we conduct all of our intra-party elections.
The most glaring issue on February 22nd was that black box machines counted the votes for State Party Chair.
As many delegates protested, this goes against the majority of Republican opinion, not just in our state but nationwide – right to the Oval Office. It undermines, by example, every goal election integrity patriots are working toward in the areas of transparency and an end to black box voting. The attempt by a majority on the last cycle’s State Committee to throw a bone to us by adding a limited audit system (very similar to Jocelyn Benson’s useless “risk limiting audits”) set the worst possible example and creates a false sense of security.
With the Detroit River in the background, members of District 9’s Audit Team enjoy a brief break in the action
Elections run like the State Convention on Saturday, February 22nd are NOT inherently secure, but because the margin of victory in the chair race was not even close, it was unlikely to have been a significantly corrupted outcome. That’s because the limited audit system did permit a large number of auditors (like myself), assigned to different districts, to view the strikingly lopsided chair race results in real time. Because the auditors, in turn, shared their observations informally with auditors from adjacent districts, it quickly became clear, in an anecdotal sense, that Sen. Runestad had won convincingly. Any attempt to rig the machine vote would have been immediately obvious to dozens of auditors. But in a close race, such gross observations would not have been reliable. And keep in mind, all the Vice Chair races were not audited that day and thus most had no safeguard against election manipulation.
Furthermore, a close race could have been corrupted through exploitation of a variety of vulnerabilities inherent in Saturday’s counting system. One of the most obvious was the selection process for the district audits themselves. Remember, we had a drawing up on the stage where a paid party staffer drew district numbers from a container he alone held. A piece of paper with the number 3 was drawn, therefore District 3 was selected to audit the Chair Race. But what we didn’t know was who put those numbers inside the box? Were any observers up close to view if the box was empty at the start and the numbers were equally distributed among the 13 districts? Did challengers have access to that process from start to finish? (We didn’t see them onstage during the drawing).
The other problem was that, even if the selection of numbers was rigorously secure, the timing of the drawing – before the voting had occurred – made it inherently corruptible. That’s because, once the drawing occurred, the computer count could be altered to ensure that any improper vote shifts only affected districts that had not been selected to be audited. Once the drawing took place and the identity of the district(s) tapped to audit the chair race became known, all it would take a hypothetical bad actor to do would be to insert a pre-programmed thumb drive in the black box machines (or access them remotely via modem) and a vote-shifting algorithm could do the rest.
As in most modern vote fraud, this scenario would be the most plausible in a close race. And, to be clear, this is only a hypothetical scenario and a critique of a flawed process, not of those who carried out the count. It is not meant to cast aspersions on individual election participants. It is meant to work toward the development of an improved process, based on best practices and the elimination of vulnerabilities that could invite or facilitate fraud in future intra-party elections. I would be remiss if I did not remind seasoned delegates and educate the newly-elected that at the 2022 State Endorsement Convention in Grand Rapids, we successfully conducted a hand count audit of the machines, essentially keeping them honest, right down to the vote in every race. It went without a hitch and was run entirely by randomly-selected volunteers from among the convention’s delegates and alternates. We can further streamline and standardize that process and we can recruit committed delegates who can become experienced in hand count voting. All it takes is the will to do it.
The final results appear on the big screen at the Feb 22nd State Convention
Finally, we need to develop a system of blank ballot security. This requires:
- A count of ballots prior to the event in each “style” (ballot design)
- A written record of how many ballots were issued for each election
- A log of how many ballots were used in the voting of each election
- The number of unused, blank ballots remaining after the voting
- A list of any ballots that are unaccounted for: i.e. missing or extra
- Proper chain of custody during transport from the counting room to the storage area (in case of a recount)
Introducing proper security measures for our intra-party elections at the State Convention level will not occur without a fight. And it will be a battle fought and decided in the State Committee, but District and local level input from concerned Republicans is essential if we are to move to a culture of excellence in vote counting at our MIGOP State Conventions.
Author: Phil O’Halloran, District 9 SC member and former MIGOP Election Integrity Chairman
Next week: Part II will explore intra-party election strategies for District, County and State Committee elections