The Republican National Committee and the Michigan Republican Party have launched a lawsuit that contends officials in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold, are failing to appoint enough GOP election workers to comply with state law.
The Republican lawsuit asked a judge to issue an order specifically requiring Detroit, Michigan’s largest city, to treat nominees for the position of election inspector for the Nov. 5 election from the two major political parties “equally throughout the process.”
Election inspectors are responsible for checking-in voters, issuing ballots, assisting with tabulation and helping with processing absentee ballots, according to the Michigan Secretary of State’s office.
The new suit, filed Thursday in Wayne County Circuit Court, came amid a continued onrush of voting-related litigation in Michigan and was similar to a 2022 GOP suit that targeted the breakdown of election inspectors in Flint, another Democratic stronghold.
For the Aug. 6 primary, the Detroit Election Commission appointed about 2,337 Democratic election inspectors and about 310 Republican election inspectors, according to the Republican-led lawsuit. Those numbers meant 300 of Detroit’s 335 precinct failed to achieve the state’s somewhat uncertain standard that there be “an equal number, as nearly as possible” of election inspectors from each major political party, the suit argued.
“The 7.5 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans that resulted in the lack of parity within 300 of the 335 precincts violated the election commission’s statutory duty to appoint ‘an equal number, as nearly as possible’ of election inspectors in each election precinct from each political party,” the lawsuit added.
The suit named the Republican National Committee, the Michigan Republican Party and three local Republican Party officials as the plaintiffs. The named defendants included the Detroit Election Commission and Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey.
“The law department is not commenting on this pending litigation,” said Corey McIsaac, deputy director of media relations for Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s office.
The administration of elections in Detroit and the partisan breakdown of election workers in Democratic-heavy cities have been ongoing topics of political debate in the battleground state of Michigan.
Democrat Joe Biden won about 94% of the vote in Detroit in November 2020. Republican Donald Trump got about 5% or 12,889 votes in the city. So the task of finding Republicans to participate in trainings and work elections in Detroit has not always been easy for city officials.
No one has tried to stand in the way of Republicans working as election inspectors in Detroit, said Jonathan Kinloch, a Democrat and former member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.
Republicans should pick up the phone and work with Winfrey to address the matter, Kinloch said. Instead, the Republican lawsuit is meant to create a distraction and chaos in the election, Kinloch said.
“I think this is just another tactic,” said Kinloch, a Wayne County commissioner.
A report by the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee on the 2020 presidential election recommended that officials in Wayne County, where Detroit is located, “work together to obtain the correct number of workers for each election.”
“The committee understands the logistics of recruiting Republicans for Wayne County and the city of Detroit can be difficult but finds the repeated reports of volunteers not being accepted or not having their emails returned troubling,” the Republican-controlled committee’s report said.
Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee for president, has made unproven claims that there was “rampant” fraud in Detroit’s 2020 election. And in November 2020 after Trump lost Michigan to Biden, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, suggested Trump would win Michigan’s election if the votes cast in Wayne County weren’t included.
In the new lawsuit, Republicans said they provided Winfrey a list of 675 individuals who were interested in serving as election inspectors in Detroit. But only 52 of them actually were appointed as inspectors for the primary, according to the suit.
It’s unclear what the city’s interactions were with the 675 people and how the courts will view the new Republican National Committee-backed lawsuit.
So far, a similar suit brought by the Republican National Committee and the Michigan Republican Party against the partisan breakdown of election inspectors in Flint has been unsuccessful as the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled the national and state parties weren’t the proper entities to bring the litigation.
“The statutes at issue in this case only offer a role to county chairpersons to assist boards of election commissioners in locating prospective election inspectors to meet the partisan-composition requirements,” a Court of Appeals decision from March said.
In the Detroit-focused suit, however, Cheryl Costantino, chairwoman of the 13th Congressional District Republican Committee, Jodie Brown, chairwoman of the Wayne County 12th Congressional District Republican Committee, and Ann Clark, chairwoman of the Wayne County Republican Committee, signed on as plaintiffs.
In a statement, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley and Co-Chairwoman Lara Trump said Detroit’s “failure to hire Republican poll workers is the kind of bad-faith Democrat interference that drives down faith in elections.”
“The RNC is bringing suit to remedy this completely unacceptable breach of public trust and our unprecedented election integrity campaign will continue to fight in Michigan and nationwide to protect the rights of every voter to have fair, accurate, secure and transparent elections,” Whatley and Lara Trump added.
cmauger@detroitnews.com
