Waterford Today

With several key states having very close vote tallies after the recent election, President Donald Trump’s campaign and fellow Republicans have raised concerns over various allegedly intentional efforts by Democrats on the ground in Democrat-controlled cities such as Detroit to prevent Republican poll challengers from witnessing vote counts.

Former Republican Michigan Sen. Patrick Colbeck was at the TCF Center as a poll challenger on Nov. 3 and 4, and he appeared on WJR’s "The Frank Beckmann Show" to discuss what he saw there.

Colbeck told Beckmann he was at the TCF Center as a member of the Election Integrity Fund, an organization Colbeck founded. The organization had about 500 volunteers working as poll challengers statewide, with about 30 at the TCF Center on Nov. 3.

“I was right there when all the craziness that everybody’s talking about was happening,” Colbeck told Beckmann.

Colbeck said there were Democrat poll challengers at the TCF Center as well, though they seemed more interested in disrupting Republican poll challenging efforts than actually safeguarding the integrity of the process.

“They were deliberately instructed to interfere with the activities of our poll challengers,” Colbeck told Beckmann. “We don’t know the name of the person who did it, but we have people that were there, as these new challengers came in, and attested to the fact that they were being instructed to deliberately disrupt our activities.”

Colbeck said even elections staff were, at best, unhelpful, refusing to answer such simple questions as how the numbers from the count were going to be reported to the county.

“I was very curious as to what that fundamental process looked like, and they would not tell me,” Colbeck told Beckmann. “And the lack of transparency went well beyond that.”

Colbeck alleged that poll workers and elections staff used COVID-19 as an excuse to prevent Republican poll challengers from being able to effectively watch the counting process.

“When you heard about the cardboard going up on the windows and everything, you know what excuse they were using to keep us out of the counting board? It was COVID,” Colbeck told Beckmann. “They were saying we were exceeding our COVID capacity.”

Colbeck told Beckmann that he hopes to have some answers in the coming days, but he believes the handling of the election in Detroit was unacceptable.