'There's no fraud': Here's why a GOP election skeptic changed his mind
Abe Dane was skeptical of the 2020 presidential election results until he got a peek under the hood as the elections administrator in his county.
The Republican county clerk for deep-red Hillsdale County, which Donald Trump won with more than 76 percent of the vote, faces an election challenge in November from Stephanie Scott, who has been charged in a scheme to overturn the former president's election loss, but Dane says he's come to believe the voting system is safe and secure, reported The Guardian.
"I began to be an election inspector in the 2020 elections, and I knew things were on the up-and-up here," Dane told the publication. "I didn’t have any questions about our own county. But I had questions about, you know, Detroit or Wayne County – things like that. As I got into election administration, I started seeing the processes, the checks and balances, the security that’s involved, and got familiar with a qualified voter file – the state’s voter registration system – and how they manage that list."
Dane has met and worked alongside election administrators in other counties around Michigan and came to understand they all cared about their voters and making sure the results were accurate, and he realized they weren't partisans trying to engineer certain outcomes.
"So no, there’s no fraud here," Dane said.
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The challenge has been to explain that to his deeply conservative community, where his neighbors still question how Trump – who remains solidly popular – lost to president Joe Biden, but he's stopped trying to tiptoe around the issue as he's grown more confident in the security of election systems outside his own state.
"Being a Republican and administering elections, I’m pushing back on that [politicization]," Dane said. "I try my best when I’m at township meetings, or city meetings, to choose my words carefully."
"I guess when I first started, I was a little bit more cautious," he added. "Here’s an example: I would say, 'In Hillsdale County, there is no election fraud going on. We are doing things right in this county.' I’d always say 'in this county.' I’ve gotten to the point now where I personally believe that our elections nationwide are completely fine, and so I’m starting to stop that, and to stop trying not to offend my fellow Republicans in my county. I’ll just say flat-out, like, 'I don’t think there was election fraud anywhere. I think people have a different worldview than you and you can’t accept that.'"