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June 12, 2025 13 mins
Exposing major issues festering beneath Michigan’s election system with data analyst and transparency advocate/ From FOIA fees and redacted files to shifting vote histories and secret data discrepancies, Braden outlines how Michigan’s elections—from local clerks to the Secretary of State—are riddled with inconsistencies that undermine voter trust. The bombshell? Clerks aren’t even given receipts for their uploads. Meanwhile, the Attorney General and Secretary of State work in lockstep to silence whistleblowers and prosecute those digging for the truth—including attorney Stephanie Lambert, who faces trial in July. This isn’t just about 2020—it’s about whether 2026 and 2028 will mean anything at all.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, we had big hearings happening election integrity. One of
them last week in fact court.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
And you may think this is frivolous, but he won
in court because he was right. And instead the Secretary
of State is bringing decrees on these clerks and imposing
these ideas on them such that they try to make
Tim and I pay these exorbitant fees. I made a
foyer recently for about five pages of double space messages

(00:26):
from the Secretary of State. They waited six months to
give it to me and charged me six hundred and
fifty dollars or something for that foy. If any company
was run this way, it would be buried in the dirt.
It would be rightfully buried in the dirt, wait waiting,
making their shareholders wait six months for their data, for
their shareholder data.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
She's a data geek, as affectionately, I'll call him a
data geek boy. We'll give you some of his credentials
here in just a moment. But a freedom fighter, Brandon
Jacobotzi joins us right now. Appreciate you taking the time
to testify in front of those folks during the Election
Integrity committee here and Lansing, but also to join us
and give us the skinny and the heads up on

(01:05):
this story. Braden, welcome in.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Thank you justin. It was an honor and a privilege
to be invited to that committee and to testify about
the things that we've been noticing over the last four
or five years here in our elections in Michigan. Thanks
for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Absolutely, you've you've I want to break down some of
those because you made some interesting points and talked about
a few of those things in the in the testimony
that I think are worth note. But you know, one
of the things that that I think is is really
hard to get past is the data portion. And in
your in your testimony and your presentation, you you you

(01:42):
brought up a really interesting piot. I'm gonna let you
break down whatever you want to break down and share
with us today. But I thought we'd just start here.
And and as you were trying to get for your
request and talk about getting some of this data back,
and literally this is checking your work. You remember you
went to school the math teacher would say, all right,
show me your work. I see how you Let's see
how you got to this conclusion. That's what we're asking

(02:04):
election officials to do, and they have a hard time
doing that. Transparency isn't a thing, particularly with the Secretary
of State Jocelyn Benson. But when you do start to
add up numbers that you get, they never really seem
to flesh out. And you showed one slide that showed
multiple discrepancies from all sorts of different agencies and areas,

(02:24):
and I thought this was worth a place to start at.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, it's very troublesome when we first started this journey
because I kind of woke up in twenty twenty being
a poll challenger and I didn't think that I would
see anything except have a boring day, and then you
realize that there's all these problems in the system. And
what we noticed is that when we first started looking
at this, we thought, you know, maybe the clerks had

(02:49):
something to do with this, and that they were hiding
stuff from us or something like that. But as we
worked through this for the last four years, it's been
more and more indicative of a problem at the where
you have a leadership that's intentionally instigating problems between clerks
and people who are investigating. There is is the public,

(03:09):
their constituents. So the clerks will get one file because
the elections occur at a local level, justin and so
the data that you get at a local level you
would expect to be the most accurate data because that's
where the elections are actually run. But when we look
at the data from the local election, and then that
data feeds the county data, which looks at all of

(03:30):
the data for the whole county for the election. Then
that data from the county level feeds the state level.
And we're finding that most of the time, without sales
data never matches what you see from the Secretary of State.
And so what the Secretary of State then does is
when we talk to her and say, hey, this data
doesn't add up, she then blames the clerks. Well, the
clerks have no resource here because the clerks are never

(03:53):
given a receipt. Now, if I go to McDonald's, if
I go to any restaurant or any business, doesn't matter
if they have a million dollar systems, you know, a
world class system or not, they are required to give
me a receipt. I get a receipt for exactly what
I got. But these local clerks don't even get a receipt.
So when they upload their files at the end of
an election, and so now the Secretary of State can

(04:15):
can blame them for problems that are clearly, clearly seem
to be happening at a state level.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
That's just unthinkable that that would even be a thing.
I mean, it's just unthinkable that they don't get a
receipt for what they've.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
I've tossed the clerks and they say, well, we do
we do a spot check. And I asked, can you
show me the receipt so that I can prove that
to the Secretary of State that you uploaded your file
on time and that she's wrong. And they think, well,
we just do a spot check because they don't give
us anything. Now, maybe that's not true, but that's what
we hear. I've heard some multiple clerks.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
Now unbelievable. So what else have you found in the
testimony the other day that you shared. I know that
Richelle Reperschel Smith has been on this jay the Boyers Well,
folks really want to get answers in the working hard.
Thankfully now as Republicans controlling the House are going to
have that opportunity. But you weren't even allowed to ask

(05:07):
these questions bring these things up previously. Now we finally
have the opportunity to do. So what are you finding.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, well, first of all, I want to I want
to thank Representative Smith and that entire committee for actually
doing something now about this. And what we're finding is
that even at the base fundamental level of the file structure,
so we know that like headers and file names and
file types, that all seems really boring and mundane to people.
But if you have, like your election system is just

(05:38):
a bunch of computers talking to each other at the
end of the day, when you it's a big data system,
and if you have one computer talking to another computer
and it's not having a standardized process, and in one
computer you have a set of data where column am
needs one thing, and then you have another computer where
plum amy is an entirely different thing, and then you
try to bring that data together, you're going to have
garbage data. And there's there's a phrase that they use

(06:02):
in all industries, across all industries, especially data, it's garbage
in and garbage out. So right now, we're paying for
this multimillion dollar election system, and it doesn't matter how
beautiful in pristine it is, doesn't matter how good the
clerks are, if they're getting garbage data into that system,
and the system is not set up properly or not
designed to be set up properly. We don't know. You're

(06:23):
necessarily going to get garbage data out or data that's
not trustworthy, and that's what we're seeing because you end
up with multiple versions of the truth, and that doesn't
mean that both versions are accurate. It means that whoever
gets one version is going to believe one thing, and
then the other person is going to believe another thing.
And then when they come together, like when we go

(06:44):
to these clerks, you're going to be at odds with
each other unnecessarily, and it's creating a friction where you
should be working together, but now both of you end
up creaking that you're lying to each other, and that
creates a problem because now instead of pointing the finger
at the Secretary of State and the leadership where it belongs,
who is instigating this problem, you end up fighting amongst

(07:05):
each other. And that's not what we want here because
it's clerks by and large just want to do a
good job. I think.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yeah, I would say at the local level, that's largely
what I found as well, and many of them are
frustrated by this whole process, right, Yeah, were some of.

Speaker 3 (07:23):
The data that we looked at. It's like, this isn't
just a northern Michigan thing. It's not just the west coast,
east coast of Michigan thing. When we looked at the
southeast Michigan in Detroit, where you have a huge density
of population and where you would be disenfranchising minority voters
most this isn't a Republican or Democrat black the white things,
not a male female thing. But when we look at

(07:44):
Detroit City voters, when we look at the local, the state,
and the county election data, the numbers don't match up
for the twenty twenty four elections. We aren't just saying
that this twenty twenty election was a problem. We're looking
at twenty twenty four now. We're looking at the fact
that even though all of these things has been blots
to light the last four years, the problems don't get
better and they seem to be getting worse. And as

(08:06):
we find problems, what we've noticed is that instead of
working with us, the Secretary of State shames us and
tells the clerks not to work with us, and tries
to shame and tell the clerks to not work with
us and then removes data from the reports that were
given to make it harder for us to catch it.
When we used to look at the data up until

(08:30):
the fall of last year, we were able to look
at the voting method that somebody used in an election,
and that was key because in the twenty twenty election,
in the twenty twenty two elections following, we were able
to notice that in the vote history files. Let's say
that you voted in the election and you voted absonte
justin well, from one month to the next it would shift,

(08:51):
so it would say you voted abson Tee, and then
it might say that you didn't vote at all, and
then the next time it would say that you voted
in person, and then you know, on and on and on,
and this would have been two, three, four, or five
even seven times for one person where the vote histories
would just change inexplicably, even though the law indicates that
these qbs, these files have to be maintained and closed

(09:13):
after an election within seven days, so none of the
files add up. And the very fundamental essence of what
an election is, which is your vote, is constantly being
sifted and we don't know why.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Well, Brighton Jacobotzi with this right now. You know, listen,
I know this is a story that you continue to
work on. I want to ask you, uh, because we're
not today. We're not going to have this solved overnight.
But part of what we're having on for is just
to its literally just to have more awareness brought to
this situation, to raise that level up. Why is this

(09:48):
so important in twenty twenty six and beyond in the
state of Michigan.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
Well, it's fundamental because, like I said, the Secretary of State,
when we bring things to light, you think that we
want to work together and make things better. But instead
the reports were given are redacted information, so only a
privileged set of elite people apparently are allowed to see
the full file, which suggests that there's multiple books being
used because one person, if you go to a local clerk,

(10:14):
they get one set of books that has all the
data that we need, and then if you go to
the Secretary of State, you don't get it. And the
reason why, I mean, first of all, that means that
nobody can trust the data that they're given when they're
paying for all of this stuff. However, going in a
twenty twenty six and twenty twenty eight. There are very
few attorneys and clerks and people that are willing to
work on this because they know that there is this

(10:37):
kind of unity between the Attorney General and the Secretary
of State. Well, they will come down on people for
questioning this, even though all we're doing is looking at
their official data. The Attorney General I'm working on behalf
of the Secretary of State admitted during in the appellate
court during a case that I was a plaintiff on
that if there was a law that they didn't like,

(10:59):
that they would I think they said they would just
set it aside and just let it sit there, So
they would ignore a lot they just didn't like it,
or if it was they found it too burdensome, and
that's not the way that you can run an election
and have your election be trusted. We have an attorney
right now, Strephanie Lambert, who has to go to trial
next month, and because she was trying to aid in

(11:24):
figuring out what was going on in these systems, because
clerks were looking at her and they were noticing some
of this stuff, and so they tried to get to
the bottom of it, and instead of trying to figure
out what the problem was. The Attorney General is coming
after these attorneys instead, and so it's putting. It's having
a very silencing and a dealiterious effect on everybody, and
it's disenfranchising voters of all races and all creeds, and

(11:47):
so I guess I just want to make sure that
we highlight this before that trial in July, because there's
only a fraction of a percent of people in Michigan
that even know that this data exists and that this
is going on, and we're supposed to have our people
go before a jury of our peers, and our peers
have no idea what the truth is, and there's all
these different, multiple versions of the truth. We need to

(12:08):
make sure that they see the accurate data coming out
and that they know that if they get on that
jury pool, that we need them to have a balanced
few of.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
Brighton Thank you for the updates. Let me ask you,
what's the best way people want to follow you, find
out more about what you're up to and and maybe
support the work.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Thank you for asking. You can find me on X.
My handle is at Michigan Branden at Michigan d R
A D E N or you can look up Michigan's
fair elections run by Patrise Johnson as well as Michigan
District nine. You can find them at m I district
the number nine.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
We appreciate you taking the time shining some light on
this very important and again the fight continues.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
Justin Begain, thank you so much, Justin, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
You got in my pleasure, but my
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