A Michigan election integrity group has released a sweeping 720-page report documenting what it calls a pattern of legally unauthorized power grabs by the state's executive branch since 2020, and the findings land just weeks before the 2026 election.
The Michigan Fair Elections Institute, a nonprofit that describes itself as nonpartisan, published the report titled "Michigan Election Issues 2020 and Ripple Effects" after what it says was a six-year review of statutes, court rulings, sworn testimony, official records, and documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. The report contains 15 findings and recommends that both federal and state authorities open further investigations into how Michigan's elections have been administered since the 2020 presidential race, The Center Square reported.
The timing is pointed. Michigan's 2026 election is roughly 61 days away. And the report arrives after the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sent a July letter to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson flagging what it called "suspected deficiencies", described as "all matters warranting immediate attention."
Patrice Johnson, founder and chair of MFEI, said the report goes beyond a simple look back at 2020.
"This report is more than a recounting of Michigan's experience of the 2020 election. The expansion of Secretary of State's role in Michigan is ongoing; the centralization of election processes in Lansing has been incremental but it has also been unrelenting."
At the center of the MFEI report is a charge that Michigan's executive branch steadily consolidated control over election administration, bypassing the state legislature in the process. The report describes "a documented pattern of election-rulemaking authority consolidated in the executive branch" and labels the centralization efforts "legally unauthorized."
That pattern, the report states, "accelerated following the 2019 transition in executive leadership." The transition appears to refer to the period when new statewide officeholders, including Secretary of State Benson, took office. What followed, the report says, was "the increasing use of executive orders and actions that bypassed constitutionally required legislative enactment."
For voters who watched Michigan's election rules shift through administrative guidance rather than legislation, from expanded mail-in ballot access to changes in ballot-processing procedures, the report puts a name on the mechanism. Johnson framed it as a direct threat to the state's historically decentralized election structure.
"One of the strengths of Michigan elections is its decentralized structure. Clerks are elected officials in their own right with authority and responsibilities. We can't let that slip away under the cover of non-legislative rule changes or opaque procedures that require citizens to 'just trust' the system."
That decentralized model, where locally elected clerks run elections in their own jurisdictions, is a safeguard against the kind of top-down manipulation that centralized systems invite. When a secretary of state's office absorbs those functions through rule changes rather than statute, it removes a layer of accountability that voters never agreed to surrender.
One of the more striking details in the MFEI report is that its findings overlap with concerns already raised by the federal government. The DOJ Civil Rights Division's July letter to Benson identified "suspected deficiencies" in Michigan's election administration, language that echoes the report's own conclusions. The MFEI report notes that "these same statutory subjects recur throughout this report."
Benson's office has not publicly responded to either the DOJ letter or the MFEI report, based on available information. That silence is itself notable. When the federal government's own civil rights enforcement arm tells a state election chief that there are deficiencies requiring "immediate attention," the public deserves an answer, not a stonewall.
The broader federal focus on election integrity legal efforts ahead of the 2026 and 2028 cycles adds weight to the MFEI report's call for investigation. The question is whether state and federal authorities will act on the documented concerns or let them gather dust.
The MFEI report is not the only recent spotlight on Michigan's 2020 election. President Trump, who lost the state to former President Joe Biden by 2.8 percentage points in 2020, addressed the issue directly in a primetime address to the nation earlier this year.
"Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan in 2020. It was pay, play, and cheat."
The MFEI report does not explicitly connect its findings to the voter registration operation Trump referenced. But both point to the same state, the same election, and the same underlying concern: that Michigan's 2020 election was administered in ways that departed from established law and undermined public confidence.
Johnson said the report was built by volunteers working from primary-source records, not political talking points. She told The Center Square that MFEI's goal is transparency.
"The purpose of the report is to document, to provide a record of how radically Michigan's elections have changed since 2020 and to identify areas that still need investigation or legislative reform."
The MFEI report focuses on administrative and legal mechanisms, but the broader picture of Michigan's 2020 election includes a massive infusion of private money that reshaped how the election was run on the ground. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife donated $419.5 million to election-related nonprofits, including $350 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and $69.5 million to the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Those funds flowed disproportionately to heavily Democratic urban areas in key swing states, Michigan among them.
The spending gap was stark. In Wisconsin, another swing state that received CTCL funds, Democratic stronghold cities saw per-voter election spending reach $47, while Republican-leaning rural counties operated on $4 to $7 per voter. CTCL grant agreements included "claw back provisions" requiring recipient cities to implement controversial measures like ballot drop boxes and consolidated counting centers, or return the money.
Phill Kline, director of the Amistad Project at the Thomas More Society, called the arrangement a "shadow government running our elections." Researchers at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute went further. William Doyle, a researcher who studied the funding patterns, concluded that the structural bias created by the funding disparity "likely created enough additional votes for Biden to secure an Electoral College victory in 2020."
Twenty-five of the 26 CTCL grants exceeding $1 million went to jurisdictions Biden carried. The sole Trump-winning county that received a large grant got less than 1.3 percent of what other top recipients received.
When private money can redirect a state's election infrastructure toward one party's voters, through legal channels that bypass legislative approval, it raises the same centralization concerns the MFEI report documents. The mechanism differs, but the effect is the same: decisions about how elections are run get made outside the democratic process.
Michigan is not the only state where election administration has come under scrutiny. The Department of Homeland Security has identified 278,000 noncitizens on voter rolls nationwide, a finding that has fueled calls for tighter verification procedures before the 2026 midterms.
Federal enforcement has also picked up. The DOJ recently brought its first criminal charge in a crackdown on noncitizen voter registration, arresting a Honduran national on voter fraud charges. And the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration's executive order on mail-in voting procedures, a move aimed at tightening controls that critics say were loosened too far during and after the pandemic.
Against that backdrop, the MFEI report reads less like an isolated complaint and more like one piece of a national reckoning with how the 2020 election was actually conducted, and what was changed without voters' knowledge or consent.
Johnson's closing argument is simple. She is not asking voters to accept a predetermined conclusion about fraud. She is asking officials to open the books.
"Trust Michiganders. Involve citizens in a system that is transparent and open for inspection and true accountability."
She added that transparency "would likely lessen much of the complexity in our elections", a polite way of saying that the opacity itself is the problem. When election systems become too complicated for citizens to follow and too centralized for local clerks to control, the inevitable result is suspicion. And suspicion, left unanswered, corrodes the legitimacy of every election that follows.
The MFEI report runs 720 pages. Michigan's Secretary of State has offered no public response. The DOJ has flagged deficiencies and demanded immediate attention. The 2026 election is weeks away.
If the officials responsible for running Michigan's elections have nothing to hide, they should welcome the scrutiny. Their silence suggests they know what the report found.