Left-wing district attorneys will get to decide whether or not to investigate claims of election problems in Michigan, thanks to two bills Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law on Monday. 

Democrats championed SB 603 and SB 604, which dictate that a recount can only occur under a narrow set of conditions: There must be an allegation of “error” – not fraud – and anyone alleging error must prove it would have changed the outcome of the election. As The Federalist has previously reported, the bill also doubles the fee to request a recount. 

Whitmer claimed the bills “ensur[e] that the security of every vote is protected and that losing parties cannot stop the winners from taking office.”

These new laws, which already make it prohibitively difficult to conduct a recount, eliminate the bipartisan Board of State Canvassers’ power to investigate fraud, instead forcing them to delegate the task to partisan county prosecutors or the partisan attorney general.

In Detroit, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office – headed by Democrat District Attorney Kym Worthy – doesn’t even handle election fraud cases, according to Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Maria Miller.

“We do not handle election fraud cases in Wayne County,” Miller wrote to The Federalist in an email. “Those are referred to the Michigan attorney general.”

Detroit has a long history of election problems. Local outlet The Detroit News found in 2016 that more votes were cast than there were voters in one-third of the city’s precincts. And in 2019, a lawsuit claimed the city did not properly clean its voter rolls, leaving thousands of dead and duplicate voter registrations on the records, according to The Detroit Free Press.

In the 2020 election, Republican poll watchers in Detroit were removed from a polling station, as The Federalist previously reported. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign filed suit over the matter.

Under the new bill, allegations of election misconduct in cases like these would be referred to the county prosecutor. And when the county prosecutor doesn’t handle election fraud, like in Detroit, victims of fraud would be left only to appeal to the state’s attorney general.

But in Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel is hardly an unbiased arbiter of these matters. After 16 individuals made a contingency plan in case, in the confusion and aftermath of the 2020 election, it turned out that Trump had won Michigan, Nessel charged these so-called “false electors” with felonies for forgery and violating elections law.

Nessel also engaged in fear-mongering in June, when she reportedly gave an address with the Michigan State House’s LGBT Caucus about the supposed dangers of “Trump’s homophobic, transphobic and very hateful agenda.”

“The only actual way to save LGBTQ people from being launched backwards literally 50 years, if not further, is to reelect Joe Biden,” she reportedly went on to say.

So if there are other allegations of election “error” in Detroit in 2024 — which is likely, considering that the same and similar election meddlers from 2020 are still trying to interfere in our elections — cases would likely be referred to Nessel for investigation. And Nessel has already made it clear she thinks reelecting Trump would be dangerous.

Even if a county prosecutor did not have a policy of referring election fraud cases to Nessel’s office, the prosecutors of jurisdictions including Lansing, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, and Flint are all Democrats, whose party is often the one accused of election misconduct. Critics contend that investigating allegations of election fraud should be placed in the hands of the nonpartisan Board of State Canvassers, not partisan county prosecutors.

Republicans like state Rep. Jay DeBoyer say the change violates a system of checks and balances that ensure election integrity.

“We have time-honored laws in this state that allow bipartisan county boards of canvassers the ability to investigate fraud, wrongdoing or a violation of the law,” DeBoyer, who is also a member of the House Elections Committee, said in a press release. “These bills delete multiple references to fraud and even strike out references to ballot tampering. They ultimately work to discourage the notion that fraud could be a reason for a discrepancy.”

Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo's editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.