The Michigan Department of Attorney General Dana Nessel said that ballots received after polls close on Nov. 3 aren’t counted, following a Project Veritas report that carried allegations of back-dating ballots.
“Under Michigan law, ballots have to arrive at the clerk’s office by when the polls close on Nov. 3 regardless of when it’s stamped. What matters is when it is delivered to the clerk’s office, not the postmarked date,” Ryan Jarvi, the Michigan AG press secretary told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
“If someone today stamped a letter with Nov. 2 and dropped it off at the clerk’s office, it wouldn’t be counted,” he said.
The postal worker, whose identity was kept anonymous, told Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe that he works in the state’s Traverse City Barlow branch.
The USPS told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that it is aware of the video, and that it has been referred to the USPS and the Office of Inspector General.
The Epoch Times could not independently verify the claims in the video.
Election law in the battleground state of Michigan requires that ballots be received by the election clerk before the close of polls—8 p.m. on Election Day.
The unnamed self-proclaimed postal worker alleged in the interview with Project Veritas that on Nov. 4, he and his colleagues were issued a directive by his direct supervisor, Jonathan Clarke, at the Barlow branch to collect any ballots they found in mailboxes, collection boxes, and any outgoing mail, and separate them at the end of the day so that they could be hand stamped with the previous day’s date—Nov. 3, Election Day.
“So I’ve, and this is anecdotal, [a] carrier down in another office said they watched the postmaster doing it,” the USPS whistleblower said. “If it were just a typical day, it would be clerks doing it up at the distribution center.”
Michigan, which has 16 Electoral College votes, is a crucial swing state with about 7.7 million registered voters, 1.3 million of whom are on the permanent absentee ballot list. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced that all state residents would receive absentee ballot applications; she said last month that 2.7 million people had requested absentee ballots.
President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 by a margin of just 10,704 votes—0.3 percent—over Hillary Clinton.
Trump has criticized widespread mail-in ballot initiatives, calling them corrupt. He told Axios that mail-in voting could significantly delay election results.
Trump and other Republicans have said mail-in voting could lead to ballot harvesting, allowing for people who have moved to fraudulently vote, as well as ballots being lost in the mail.
However, Democrats say mail-in voting is secure as long as the USPS is adequately funded.
“We were getting ready to win this election,” Trump said. “Frankly, we did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity, for the good of this nation.”
