We now have an additional window into attorney general candidate Matt DePerno's harebrained scheme to do something with voting machines in 2020 in an apparent effort to prove an unclear point about "election fraud," which was not real.
For those who don't follow party politics closely enough to have any idea what we're talking about, we'll back up.
DePerno is the Republican attorney who waged a legal battle on behalf of Trump in Antrim County in 2020. He's now endorsed by the former president in a race against Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel, who last week called for a special prosecutor to investigate DePerno and others for allegedly meddling with voting machines in 2020.
Here's the New York Times laying out Nessel's case:
... evidence provided by her office places Mr. DePerno at one of the “tests” of voting equipment and suggests that he was a key orchestrator of “a conspiracy” to gain improper access to machines in three counties, Roscommon and Missaukee in Northern Michigan and Barry, a rural area southeast of Grand Rapids. The tampering resulted in physical damage, but the attorney general’s office indicated that there was no evidence that there was “any software or firmware manipulation” of the equipment.
Now The Detroit News reports that DePerno was bragging about obtaining a voting tabulator as he mounted his election-fraud suit in 2020.
The vote-counting machines are supposed to be kept under strict chain-of-custody and security protocols. But DePerno's own court filings and media appearances tie him to tabulators that Attorney General Dana Nessel's office says were taken from rural areas of Michigan and transported to Oakland County for "testing."
"Then, we got access to a tabulator, and we were able to simulate elections," DePerno said on a May 6, 2021, episode of the podcast "Information Operation."
"And if I can do it up here in Michigan, with just a couple guys, you don’t think China knows how to do this?" he went on to ask. "You don’t think Russia knows how to do this? You don’t think people in D.C. know how to do it?"
It's not yet clear what, if any, impact this will have on the upcoming election. Bridge Michigan reported last week that the call for a special prosecutor could actually bolster DePerno's chances.
