(Source: MIRS.news, Published 08/31/2023) Michigan Republican Party (MRP) officials raised questions Thursday over why federal officials are foot-dragging prosecutions on those connected with a 2020 voter registration fraud case in Muskegon directly tied to Democratic Party operators.
With Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel pursuing felonies against the MRP's alternate slate of 2020 electors and the fraudulent petition circulators from the Republican gubernatorial race, it's crickets regarding GBI Strategies turning in thousands of bogus voter registration forms, they said.
MRP Chair Kristina Karamo and three members of the MRP State Committee also repeatedly called out the media to "do its job" and conduct its own look into the scope of GBI Strategies and why law enforcement found weapons at a company facility in Southfield.
"All we're asking for here is an unbiased investigation as to why on earth we can cover one side of the aisle and attack the 16 electors, but then not cover 10,000 suspected fraudulent voter registration applications," said MRP State Committee member Brayden Giacobazzi.
In October 2020, the Muskegon City Clerk reported to local police that between 8,000 to 10,000 fraudulent voter registration forms were turned over by a single GBI Strategies representative. The Tennessee-based firm does political fieldwork, including voter registration drives, for Democrats.
The Michigan State Police and special agents from the Attorney General's office were brought into the investigation. It was found that some of the forms were completely fabricated while others were real people with fake addresses and forged signatures. Some were legitimate voter registrations, according to Nessel's office.
State officials point out that the Bureau of Elections verified that none of the fraudulent names and registrants were issued ballots.
The investigation led to a search warrant on a Southfield business location of GBI Strategies in October 2020, in pursuit of documents, financial records, and electronic files to determine the scope of the criminal activity.
Nothing was found as a part of that Southfield search that was connected to the Muskegon location, but weapons, pay cards, pre-pay style cell phones, and voter registration forms were found. All of the detected firearms were determined by federal authorities to be legally owned, and incidentally stored in the location by an employee irrelevant to the business purposes of GBI Strategies.
None of the materials seized resulted in further evidence of voter fraud, according to the Attorney General's office.
In the end, investigators concluded that low-level employees at the company made up the voter registration forms as a way to show work product. Since the company was based in Tennessee and operated across the country, it was concluded that the FBI and federal authorities would quarterback any criminal action.
Now, years later, nothing has happened on this front and the Republicans are crying hypocrisy. Were other communities involved? Why was nothing done? These are among the questions being asked.
To make the case that the Muskegon situation may be part of a much larger voter manipulation issue, Karamo used the theory of “Intelligent Design” and “irreducible complexity,” a concept she learned when obtaining her master's in Christian Apologetics.
“One of the ways we can tell intelligence is when something occurs that is too complex to be reduced to chance,” Karamo said. “If a bottle of water spills, there's a high probability that it was an accident. But if water spilled on that table and a name is spelled out, we can tell that somebody did that.
“No one is going to continue to convince us that these are all just a bunch of anomalies, that these were just a bunch of mistakes. People who ask questions are conspiracy theorists, as are the rest of the Republicans? Are we America anymore? Don't citizens have the right to question their government?”
