Wayne County tells Department of Justice it doesn’t have requested ballots

“Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here. Wayne County has responded to the U.S. Department of Justice’s demand for records from the 2024 election by explaining that the county does not have the ballots, receipts, and envelopes the DOJ is looking for. But local clerks expect this will not be the end of the Trump administration’s interest in the strongly Democratic county. In a letter dated April 27 , Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett wrote to Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon that the county “is not the legal custodian of any records responsive to your request.” In Michigan, it is municipal clerks who do most of the work of administering elections. Thus, Garrett explained, election records such as ballots are maintained by cities and townships, not the county. Garrett also wrote that Michigan law doesn’t give the county any power to compel municipal clerks to hand over the records. “Accordingly, any further inquiries regarding ballot materials should be directed to the city and township clerks of the records you seek,” Garrett wrote. The DOJ doesn’t appear to have contacted any cities or townships as of yet. Michael Siegrist, the clerk of Canton Township and president of the Association of Wayne County Clerks, told Votebeat on Tuesday that he was unaware of any Wayne County municipality receiving a request for their 2024 ballots. He has had conversations with other communities, though, about what the response will be if the request does come. “At this point, we’re preparing for the 2026 election,” he said. “The legitimate requests we get, we’re going to honor, with regards to what our legal duty is under federal and state law.” The Association of Wayne County Clerks, which represents the county’s 43 city and township clerks, also put out a statement on Tuesday criticizing the DOJ’s county-level inquiry and defending Michigan’s election system. The DOJ’s letter to Wayne County “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how elections are administered in Michigan,” the statement said. “Effective oversight or inquiry begins with an accurate understanding of that structure.” The DOJ’s letter to Wayne County is just one example of the Trump administration taking an unusual interest in past elections in key swing states. In January, the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a major Democratic stronghold where the DOJ also recently demanded the names of all poll workers from the 2020 election. In March, the FBI subpoenaed records from a partisan review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona. It’s not clear what the administration’s next move in Michigan will be. The DOJ has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Votebeat, but on April 23 — before Wayne County’s response — Dhillon went on Newsmax and said officials “intend to get these records.” President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly named Detroit as one of the places whose election conduct he is most suspicious of. In its original letter to Wayne County, the DOJ cited three cases from 2020 in which Wayne County voters were accused of fraud. It also cited a 2020 lawsuit that accused the county and the city of Detroit of allowing election workers to commit fraud. That suit was quickly dismissed , with a judge writing that the “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Garrett wrote that she hoped the DOJ’s action against the three alleged fraudsters “deters others from such actions in the future” but pointed out that the allegations against Wayne County from the 2020 suit were not the job of the county clerk. Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org .

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