Trump doesn’t trust voting machines. Neither does this sheriff

These terrible machines. Donald Trump's false claims about voting machines are at the heart of his efforts to rewrite election rules ahead of the midterms. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. His claims have energized supporters in positions of power. Are you an election denier? My election denier? Well, we're presupposing we have elections, right? Know what he's saying? Some, close to the president, are pushing him to go even further. We need a national emergency because of it. If not, we're going to lose our country. With the midterms just days away, it's not just the results that are uncertain, it's whether the president will accept them at all. We don't want cheating in the midterms. Which makes the routine tasks of local clerks like Elizabeth Busk so important. I'm going to run this one upside down just to make sure it works. What exactly? Busk is the clerk in Woodland Township, a small farming community two hours west of Detroit. Detroit. Local clerks like her run most elections in the U.S. Their work will be under a microscope this November 3rd. Even small errors could be used to upend American democracy. Overvote. And so tonight in Woodland, like they do before every election, a public test of the vote counting machine. I think there's still a lot of hurting people and mistrust with the system. We will be as transparent as we possibly to help people understand our system and know that what we are doing, we have nothing to hide. She lets us watch as she feeds the voting machine a series of test ballots to make sure it's counting accurately. How many voting machines does the township have? We only have one that is active for the election. The goal of the test, says Busk, is for voters in Woodland to be able to trust the midterm results in spite of the conspiracies circulating about the process. I had so many people asking me if my tabulator is on the internet, how do you know it's not on the internet, and because there's no wires going to the internet, and it's not new enough to be Wi-Fi-able. One of those people who has taken a keen interest in the Woodland tabulator, the county sheriff. Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf has spent the last several years trying to prove voter fraud in our state. The West Michigan sheriff is continuing his investigation into fraud in the 2020 election. Sheriff Leaf has claimed Serbian foreign nationals remotely access voting machines in his county. The sheriff didn't return our calls for an interview, but locals told us he was friendly. So we walked over to his office, and sure enough, he agreed to speak with us. Why are you still investigating the 2020 presidential election? Well, it's simple. We want clean elections. I don't think I need to go any further than that. Leaf, though, has gone a lot further than that. So I started my own little posse. I call it my election investigation posse. With the help from right-wing groups and using his own deputies, he tried to seize several local voting machines after the last election. State officials accused him of harassment, but Leaf says he found evidence of voter fraud and passed it on to the Justice Department. What kind of wrongdoing did you uncover in your investigation? Well, first of all, there's a lot I cannot talk about because it's there maybe now. But referring to stuff I already made public, and we suspected that there's something going on with foreign countries. Leaf now believes that Michigan's voter rolls are being deliberately inflated with non-citizen voters, though there is little evidence to support this. Would you be willing to seize ballots? I would have to have a good reason to seize them. We'd probably seize and then go get a court order. Rejecting the results of the 2020 presidential election, the election Trump lost to Joe Biden has become one of the core beliefs of the American right. Hovering over these midterms is the prospect that election deniers, now in positions of authority, will intervene in the vote. Earlier this month, FBI Director Kash Patel refused to rule out deploying federal agents to polls on election day. We definitely considered the possibility of ICE, National Guard, military, Marines being at or near polling stations. David Becker is a former elections lawyer for the Department of Justice, who now heads the Center for Election Innovation and Research. He says the White House is using false claims of voter fraud to justify trying to take more control over the voting process. What's really unprecedented is, in our 250-year history as a nation, the federal government, the White House, the administration, has been an ally, a partner, a collaborator with the state and local governments in the United States that run elections. This administration has taken a totally different approach and is often acting more as an adversary to the states and counties as the federal government under President Trump seeks to seize power from those states and counties. Since returning to power two years ago, Trump has made several attempts to rewrite election rules, such as ordering the post office to restrict mail-in voting and trying to force states to hand over sensitive voter information in the hopes of finding evidence of non-citizen voting. All of those efforts have failed. Every single one of them, every single court that has heard those voter data cases in the United States has ruled against the Department of Justice and the administration. But with midterm polls suggesting the Republicans could lose their majorities in Congress, Trump supporters have been pushing him to take even more drastic action. They're cheating. They're cheating to steal. We've lost America. Lorenzo Sewell is a Detroit pastor, a loyal and well-connected Trump supporter. The president visited his church during the 2024 campaign. Let us pray for our 47th president. And asked him to speak at the inauguration. After that, my life has been a life where my job is to solve the problem of election fraud. Over the summer, Sewell befriended the pardoned January 6th rioter, Jake Lang. I love you, Jake. I love you. Do you think the elections here in Michigan will be fair and square? Absolutely not. This is what they do. They have to. These absentee ballots and all this early voting. Why do you need to do that? Who does that? Why has that become a thing? Because they're cheating. 2020? Absolutely. 2024? 2022. You forgot midterms. Yep. I forgot the midterms. 2022. Yep. Cheating in the midterms. Totally. We have evidence of that. 2024 presidential when Trump wins. Absolutely. There was cheating there. Yep. But they let Trump win. Totally. I mean, these are obviously very serious claims about the American electoral system. So what do you want to see happen between now and November 30th? National emergency, just like COVID. We need to have one day, paper ballot, ID, and count. He needs the people. He needs another January 6th, and that's what I'm advocating for. Minus the violence. January 6th. And look at this. Sewell is one of several prominent supporters of the president, calling on him to invoke a national emergency. Do we not need a national security emergency memorandum about these elections? His only chance now is to declare a national security emergency for elections. And Trump himself told Time magazine last month that he wasn't ruling out the measure. What legal standing, if any, does the president have to call a national emergency? This is a very easy question. Zero. If the president were to embrace such a clearly unconstitutional idea as trying to take over elections or to postpone or cancel elections or declare an emergency, that would be blocked by the courts immediately. But progressive voting groups like Michigan United aren't taking chances. They've been going door to door in Detroit, encouraging people to vote and clearing up confusion about the process. I think for us, a lot of it is misinformation and fear within our community. So we're trying to be that trusted messenger. Autumn Butler is the group's deputy executive director. In the black community, we have a saying, stay ready so you don't have to get ready. We are being proactive by ensuring that we have some mechanisms set up so that all of our voters can be confident that their votes will count and they will be counted fairly and accurately. At Michigan United's offices... If we average 20, then we should be somewhere at about 100, between 100 and maybe 150 volunteers. They've been training volunteers to monitor polling stations for interference from federal agents or Trump supporters. We just came up with a theme and it's called unified resistance. They still remember the moment in the 2020 election when a pro-Trump crowd in Detroit gathered outside a site where mail-in ballots were being counted. We are still concerned. You know, maybe they will go to Huntington Place again in Detroit and try to stop the absentee count. And that's why we have our democracy defenders. Maybe federal agents may come in and try to seize the ballots. These are things, these are scenarios that we're thinking about and planning for. But voting rights groups aren't as active in rural parts of the country, where many key races will be decided. In places like Barry County, democracy defense depends largely on the local clerks running elections. They're the ones who train and staff the poll stations. And they're the ones who make sure the voting machines will be working come election day. Democratic Party, eight. Republican Party, seven. Libertarian, six. So Elizabeth, how did the machine perform in the test? Excellent. It was 100% accurate.