Revealed: Michigan auditor general helped write GOP draft requesting 2020 election audit

When Michigan Auditor General Doug Ringler initiated an audit of the 2020 election, he did so at the request of a Republican House member. However, emails indicate that Ringler, whose office is supposed to be nonpartisan, actually helped draft the request through a series of previously undisclosed meetings with House Republican leadership staff.

Ringler’s handling of the election audit has already come under fire from some Democrats, as the MichiganAdvancepreviously reported, as well as the Office of Auditor General’s (OAG) reports on COVID-19 nursing home deaths and the state’s unemployment system.

But records obtained by the Michigan Advance provide new insight into how the election audit came about under Ringler, who was first appointed in 2014 on a unanimous vote when Republicans held the majority in the Legislature. In 2022, the GOP-led Legislature voted to reappoint him, although 26 Democrats voted against it.

In recent weeks, Ringler and several Republican lawmakers also have decried Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s proposed cut for the watchdog agency in next year’s budget — so this controversy could loom large as legislators continue their work crafting the spending plan.

On March 3, 2021, now-former state Rep. Julie Alexander (R-Hanover) issued a news release saying a letter was sent to Ringler urging him to review election processes to “answer ongoing concerns from her constituents and others throughout the state about accuracy in elections and accountability in government.”

Alexander was one of 11 House members to sign a letter seeking to delay certification of the 2020 election that former President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden.

“There are extensive and well-founded accusations of electoral administration mismanagement and deliberate and admitted violations of explicit election laws enacted by state legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” stated the letter she signed the day before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Alexander’s request was made when efforts to cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election results, both in Michigan and across the country, were nearing a fever pitch as Trump and his allies pushed the lie that a vast conspiracy had stolen the election for Biden.

While more than 250 audits involving 1,300 Republican, Democratic and nonpartisan clerks across the state had confirmed Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes, a long list of Republicans in Michigan, including elected officials like Rep. Matt Maddock (R-Milford), and his wife, then-state Republican Party Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock, continued to falsely claim that Trump won.

But when Alexander made her request for yet another audit, it was not just a lone Republican legislator joining in the chorus of GOP election-deniers. Instead, emails show it was the result of a month of collaboration between the office of then-House Speaker Jason Wentworth (R-Farwell) and Ringler. That included at least two face-to-face meetings and a string of emails, all to solicit the best way to word the request for an audit that Ringler then acted on.

Ringler was ‘happy to meet’ with GOP

The process that resulted in the official March 3, 2021, request from Alexander actually began a month earlier, according to emails obtained by the Advance following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

On Feb. 2, former state Rep. Shane Hernandez (R-Port Huron), then working as Wentworth’s director of strategy, sent an email to Ringler asking for a meeting to discuss a draft letter “regarding the Secretary of State and the handling of several elections related issues.”

The next year, Hernandez ran for lieutenant governor alongside GOP gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon, who said several times she believed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been “stolen” by massive fraud.

Following his nomination to run with Dixon, Hernandez refused to say whether he thought Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. He also joined calls for a so-called “forensic audit” of the 2020 vote, a consistent talking point of Trump supporters to delegitimize the 2020 results. Dixon lost to Whitmer in November 2022 by more than 10 points.

In his letter to Ringler, Hernandez said that he had reviewed a draft letter from both Alexander and now-former Rep. Beth Griffin (R-Paw Paw), He wanted to meet with Ringler as he believed “it would be advantageous to sit down and go over the draft letter to discuss with you which areas you believe you have the jurisdiction to help and which areas are outside of your control.”

Hernandez said his ultimate goal is to help “narrow and tailor their letter to you so I can then work on the next step of redirecting the remaining questions to the proper channels.”

Less than half an hour after sending the request, Ringler responded to Hernandez and said he and Deputy Auditor General Laura Hirst “would be happy to meet” and offered three different times to get together. He also requested a draft of the proposed letter in advance, “so we can be better prepared to discuss areas within or outside of our jurisdiction? Putting the text of the letter within an email would suffice.”

Ringler and Hernandez met two days later, on Feb. 4, 2021, prior to which, Hernandez shared a draft of the letter requesting an audit. While the copy of that draft obtained by the Advance was heavily redacted through the FOIA process, what was left intact stated, “Please accept this letter as my request for a performance audit and financial audit pertaining to the management of the 2020 general election.”

A follow-up meeting with Ringler was requested by Hernandez on Feb. 16, 2021, in which he said they needed his help “honing this in a bit more,” referencing the draft of the letter that would eventually be sent requesting the audit.

Ringler responded three minutes later: “Sure. Laura (Hirst) and I will be available at our Office at 9am Thursday.”

Less than an hour after that 9 a.m. meeting on Feb. 18, 2021, Ringler sent Hernandez an email with a subject line that read, “draft 3” in which Ringler appears to have written a draft of the letter that would ultimately be sent to him.

At the top of the email, it stated: “Per our discussion this morning …”

Only the first few lines and a sentence at the very end were left unredacted, but they indicate that Ringler was participating on both sides of the request — in effect, helping to draft a letter to himself.

“Dear Mr. Ringler,” wrote Ringler. “Please accept this letter as my request for a review of various election processes to help ensure the accuracy of elections at the national, state, and local levels.”

The end of the email also included: “(I didn’t complete the entire letter. Hopefully this provides an example).”

Less than two weeks later, Alexander sent the letter to the OAG, and issued a press release calling for “transparency” in the election process.

‘The potential to erode the public’s confidence’

Prior to serving as the auditor general, Ringler worked in state government for more than three decades.

A certified public accountant and certified internal auditor, Ringler is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Michigan Association of Certified Public Accountants and the Institute of Internal Auditors. He previously received the “Internal Auditor of the Year” award from the Institute of Internal Auditors’ Lansing chapter.

Ringler’s rise through state government from civil servant to head of an agency has come largely through the approval of Republican officials. Prior to his appointment as auditor general, GOP former Gov. Rick Snyder had tapped him for several key positions.

Snyder appointed Ringler in 2011 to a team assigned the task of reviewing the city of Flint’s finances under the controversial emergency manager law. The governor also appointed Ringler in 2011 for the financial review team for the city of Detroit, which eventually resulted in the city filing in 2013 for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

And Snyder named Ringler to the financial review teams for Hamtramck, Royal Oak Township and Highland Park, as well as the Inkster, Highland Park and Muskegon Heights school districts.

When the Advance asked Ringler to comment on what the emails had revealed, an emailed response was sent by Kelly Miller, a spokesperson for the OAG.

“Legislators may seek our assistance to refine their requests for our services. We can help by ensuring their questions or requested subject matter to review falls within our jurisdiction to audit and ensure their questions or concerns are regarding issues we believe we can obtain answers to, whether or not we move forward with the requested project,” said Miller. “For clarification, the ‘draft 3’ email with redactions you forwarded is the Auditor General’s reply within an email conversation that first included a legislator’s lengthy, initial draft letter. It was addressed to him requesting a better understanding of auditing parameters, with the goal of narrowing the letter to its most concise and useful form.”

A request for comment was also sent to Hernandez, who now serves as the president of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan, but it was not returned.

However, Democratic legislative leaders said they’re concerned about the OAG’s conduct.

”The OAG is the independent oversight arm of the Legislature, and as such, the legislature — and the people of Michigan — should be able to expect the work of the Auditor General to be objective and nonpartisan,” Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) told the Advance.

House Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit) noted the mission of the OAG.

“The Office of the Auditor General has existed since 1836 and is an independent constitutional entity that is expected to carry out its duties free from partisan influence and political motives,” he told the Advance. “While we understand there may be instances where the OAG may provide limited feedback to ensure a request to the office is appropriately drafted, anything beyond that would be a violation of the integrity of the office and has the potential to erode the public’s confidence in its operations.”

Tate added that he would be taking a closer look at the situation and would not hesitate to seek what he called “an appropriate resolution” should further action be warranted.

A quickening pace of election audits

While audits of the state Bureau of Elections are not unheard of, they were relatively uncommon. For example, the OAG conducted only two between 1997 and 2018, one in 2003 and then again in 2012.

Starting in late 2019, however, the OAG under Ringler’s direction, began much more frequent investigations of the bureau, which was now operating under the purview of Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, who had drawn the ire of Republicans even before she took office.

In December 2018, just a month after voters had elected three Democrats to the state’s top three posts — Whitmer as governor, Dana Nessel as attorney general, and Benson as secretary of state — the GOP-led Michigan Senate passed a bill intended to limit Benson’s ability to implement a new voter-approved law to create an independent redistricting commission meant to form fairer political districts.

While it didn’t ultimately make it through the lame duck session and on to Snyder’s desk, it did set a tone that only grew louder when Benson moved to quickly settle a federal lawsuit on gerrymandering once in office, ultimately short-circuiting Republican hopes to prevent what eventually became the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Committee (MICRC).

The OAG initiated an audit of the Bureau of Elections in 2019, which did not raise any eyebrows at the time. After all, it had been seven years since the bureau’s last audit during the tenure of GOP then-Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, and the report that was issued that December found no major issues.

But when Alexander’s letter in March 2021 initiated another Bureau of Elections audit less than two years after the last one, some Democrats did object to what they characterized as unusual tactics, such as physically going into local clerks’ offices and reauditing the 2020 election audits they’d already completed.

“They’ve ventured into territory they don’t have statutory authority for,” Rep. Julie Brixie (D-Meridian Twp.) said of the auditor general’s office at the time. “… They went into the field and went to local clerks; they don’t have the statutory authority to do that.”

Nessel also issued an opinion in August 2021 that OAG had no legal authority to audit either the operations of county clerks or of local election results.

Six months prior to Nessel’s legal opinion, Hernandez acknowledged those limitations when he sent his first email to Ringler on Feb. 2, 2021:

“… some of the questions asked in the letter fall under your ability since they are related to a state department (SoS), but others do not since they are related to matters under the control of local clerks offices.”

‘When will the madness end?’

When the Advance asked in October 2021 why the OAG audits were being done after Nessel’s opinion, a spokesperson said the OAG’s work was “being done in accordance with the Attorney General’s opinion.”

However, Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a Democrat, said when two representatives from the auditor general’s office came to her office to re-audit their 2020 election results, “They asked me to do a hand tally of the ballots, which is part of the standard audit we already do.”

“They were unable to accurately count the vote themselves,” Byrum said. “You take out all the ballots, and my staff would read it, the local clerk would agree or not agree who the vote was for, then they’d place it in a pile. While they were doing that, [a representative from the auditor general’s office] was making hash marks. Those hash marks weren’t balancing. We said, ‘Your hash marks aren’t balancing,’ and he said, ‘Eh, close enough.’”

Byrum said she didn’t “recall having an interaction with the auditor general’s office before they were turned on to the November 2020 election.”

“Even during my time in the Legislature I don’t have any memorable interactions with the auditor general then, either,” said Byrum, who served as a Democratic House member from 2007 to 2012.

But her interactions with the auditor general’s office this time around grew “increasingly frustrating,” prompting her to ask on social media: “When will the madness end?”

“They did not understand basic election administration or law, and yet they were auditing the election audit,” Byrum said at the time to the Advance. “Ultimately, it’s these kinds of efforts — the constant questioning of the 2020 election results — that are chipping away at the public trust in the state’s and country’s elections, Byrum said. And, she said, it seems to be an outright attack from Republicans against the Whitmer administration in an attempt to defeat the Democratic governor in the November 2022 election.

“I think because there are Democrats at the top of the ticket, this is a way for Republicans to attack those public servants,” Byrum said of the constant auditing, including the one by the auditor general. “They’re not just attacking the Secretary of State and the local and county clerks; they’re attacking the integrity of our elections.”

When the audit in question finally did come out in March 2022, it found no evidence of election fraud as had been repeatedly alleged by Trump and his supporters, including Alexander.

However, the OAG audit found that “100% of the electors sampled were correctly identified as to their Congressional, State Senate, and State House of Representatives districts based on their addresses” while 99.99% of the votes were not duplicates and were within acceptable age parameters.

The report did note that post-election audits were “sufficient, with exceptions,” namely that the Bureau of Elections did not “ensure county clerks completed and timely submitted all assigned post-election audits,” and recommended that the bureau “improve its oversight and reporting of the post-election audits assigned to county clerks.”

Alexander, meanwhile, issued a release attacking Benson and claiming she had “misled the public and the Legislature about her failure to administer our valuable post-election audits,” and failed to remove dead voters from the rolls as mandated by state law.

But according to the audit, of the 11,725,897 votes cast in eight elections from May 2019 through November 2020, only 2,775, or .02% of them, were cast by electors deceased as of Election Day. And of those, the vast majority (98.5%) were cast by electors who died within 40 days prior to the election, explaining why that information may not have been reported and updated in the state’s system.

That left a total of 41 ballots, or .0000035% of the total, cast over eight elections, in which there would have been a reasonable expectation of the deceased voter’s name being removed.

Attempts by the Advance to obtain comment from Alexander, who left the Legislature in 2022 after being term-limited, were unsuccessful.

Whitmer’s office was also asked to comment, but declined and instead said the Michigan Department of State (MDOS) should provide that as the Bureau of Elections falls under their authority.

“While we understand the concerns about auditor general Ringler’s involvement in the origin of the audit, our interactions with the OAG career staff have been very professional and the resulting audit of the Bureau of Elections’ 2020 post-election audits was fair,” said Angela Benander, Benson’s director of communications and media relations. “The OAG audit confirmed the effectiveness of the most comprehensive post-election audit in state history and that the 2020 election results are legitimate.”

Critiques of other audits

Ringler has drawn other allegations of allowing GOP lawmakers to use the OAG for partisan attacks, most recently concerning the Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) and COVID-19 deaths in long-term care (LTC) facilities.

Ringler testified during a joint Oversight Committee hearing in January 2022 when Republicans controlled the Legislature. He said the report produced by the OAG on LTC deaths contained numbers of deceased patients that differed not because the Whitmer administration was attempting to cover up the deaths — but because the auditor general’s information, as requested by a GOP legislator, included more deaths than the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is required to report under federal and state requirements.

That testimony did nothing to stop the discrepancy from becoming political fodder for Republicans, with at least one GOP legislator calling for Whitmer to possibly be impeached. The report was also used for fundraising efforts by various right-wing organizations, including Michigan Freedom Fund and Michigan Rising Action.

In the case of the UIA, Director Julia Dale said that the 2022 audit, which found the agency was “not effective” in processing unemployment claims during the pandemic, ignored “UIA reforms to resolve the issues cited and lacks the context behind what caused these problems.”

Dale pointed to an outdated and faulty technology system implemented under Snyder that was found to have a 93% error rate in making false fraud findings. The agency eventually replaced the system in late 2022.

‘It wasn’t super-obvious at first’

The biggest scandal to rock the Snyder administration was the Flint water crisis. Years earlier, the city was mired in a fiscal crisis and the governor appointed Ringler to Flint’s financial review team.

Flint was the first Michigan municipality to undergo the process since Snyder signed Public Act 4 of 2011, which lowered the threshold by which an emergency manager could be appointed to oversee a public body’s finances. While the law itself was overturned by voters in 2012, an amended version replaced it.

The city ended up under an emergency manager with disastrous results after Flint in 2014 switched its drinking water supply from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River in a cost-saving move. The resulting lead contamination of the city’s water supply became an international scandal that tarred Snyder for the rest of his time in office and afterward.

Ringler’s connection to Flint extended beyond his role on the financial review team. In 2014, his first year as OAG, Ringler determined that the Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) was justified in disqualifying two samples of the city’s drinking water that had high lead levels, as they did not meet the sampling criteria.

However, as the Detroit Free Press reported at the time, records obtained by the ACLU indicated the DEQ was “not as strict in disqualifying samples with low lead levels that did not meet the testing criteria as it was in disqualifying samples with high lead readings.” Those same records also showed that a DEQ official sent Flint an email saying that the samples, those that Ringler said were ok to be ignored, showed Flint’s water contained lead above the ‘action level’ that would require public notice and remedial action.

When Ringler was later called to testify about his audit findings about the Flint water switch, he defended DEQ officials as having misinterpreted the federal Lead and Copper Rule that required the use of corrosion control chemicals which likely would have prevented the lead contamination.

At the time, state Sen. Jeff Irwin (D-Ann Arbor) was a House member serving on the joint select committee investigating the scandal. He pressed Ringler on what it would take for him to conclude that there had been negligence.

“You needed to have an absolute smoking gun,” Irwin said to Ringler. “You needed to have a video of someone pressing the poison button.”

Irwin told the Advance that at the time, while Ringler’s conclusions didn’t sit well with him, he had no reason to believe they were partisan in nature.

“It wasn’t super-obvious at first to me that there seemed to be a shading towards the right,” said Irwin. “The Flint water review was really my first interaction with the (OAG), and while I felt that they positioned some things to be less harsh on the [Snyder] administration than I would’ve [been], it didn’t strike me as just completely beyond the pale.”

However, Irwin said that through the years, that perception began to change, starting with the audit of COVID deaths in long-term care facilities in which two sets of numbers were reported on, creating the erroneous perception of a coverup.

Ringler “absolutely did know that what he was doing was comparing apples to oranges, and he probably knew because he is not an idiot,” said Irwin. “He probably knew that the purpose of posing the comparison in that way was to make it look like the administration was doing something illegal or was hiding nursing home deaths, and it was all meant to buttress this political messaging that Gov. Whitmer was killing old people during COVID.”

Irwin said he believes Republican leaders pressed Ringler to produce a report to help “create some paperwork that would lend credibility to a non-credible argument.”

But by the time of the UIA audit, which determined that the agency paid out about $10.2 billion in pandemic unemployment assistance based on invalid eligibility criteria, Irwin said it was clear the OAG was sometimes being utilized in ways to benefit Republicans and attack Democrats.

“Early on [in the pandemic], the Republicans are right there with a lot of us Democrats, shoulder to shoulder saying, ‘I’ve got residents who are eligible for this money. They clearly should be getting this money, but the agency is just a basket case and isn’t getting the money out. What gives?’ And then just a couple months later, the Republicans flipped the script and said, ‘Oh no, you’re giving out too much money. This is all fraud,’” said Irwin.

Gearing up for a budget brawl

Earlier this month, Ringler set off alarm bells that his department’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year would see a nearly 30% reduction, which would “significantly impair” its oversight function.

In a letter to House and Senate leadership, Ringler said that Whitmer’s $80.7 billion Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 budget proposal placed a $100 placeholder in the OAG budget line item where previously 23 interdepartmental grants (IDGs) and 13 appropriations from special revenue funds were listed.

While the State Budget Office downplayed the line-item placeholder as being part of the normal process, noting a similar placeholder was also listed for the legislative retirement system, Republicans immediately responded with accusations of political interference by Whitmer.

State Rep. Cam Cavitt (R-Cheboyhan), called the cut a “plot to defund [the] Auditor General.”

“This proposed budget cut should serve as a warning to all other state agencies: if you make the governor mad, she will weaponize your budget until you either submit or your phones get shut off because you couldn’t afford to pay the bill,” said Cavitt.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Matt Hall (R-Richmond Twp.), issued a release condemning what appeared to be a proposed decrease to the budget of the OAG, which he called “the only remaining nonpartisan oversight body,” but then specifically noted the OAG audits of COVID deaths and pandemic financial assistance that had created a perception of partisanship.

A request for comment was made to Hall, but was not returned.

The budget issue aside, Irwin says he does want to emphasize that the OAG is much more than just Ringler.

“I’ve always been a little bit reluctant to impugn the integrity of the auditor general because there’s other people in that office and the work they do is generally important,” he said. “I also don’t want to denigrate or diminish the importance of legislative oversight over the administration. It seems to me that the office does good and faithful work in a lot of instances, but when it comes to these big political flashpoints, they either willingly or were bullied into producing reports that didn’t fairly represent the world.”

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and Twitter.