Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, claimed in a radio interview Tuesday that dead people voted in Michigan’s November election, but not enough to change Michigan’s results.
Shirkey made the comment in a Tuesday morning interview with Jackson radio station WKHM’s Greg O’Connor. It was one of his first interviews since the Hillsdale County Republican Party released a recording of a meeting with Shirkey where he called the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol a “hoax” that was “prearranged.”
In the Tuesday interview, Shirkey said Trump lost Michigan by more than 150,000 votes, adding that he lost in part because many people split their ticket, voting for Biden and then for Republicans down the ballot.
But Shirkey said the election — which officials have said was the most secure in state history — was “a little too loose.”
“Too many dead people voted and there was too much confusion at absentee counting boards, which is going to be the new reality,” he said in the interview. “So we need higher levels of training for those who are poll workers, poll watchers, poll challengers to keep the tension down in those locations.”
He pushed back on insinuations that there were any issues with the state’s voting machines, however.
“We’ve done a lot of analysis on that ... the facts are: the machines weren’t the issue.”
Shirkey did not provide any evidence of his claim that votes were cast under the names of dead people, but the Michigan Secretary of State’s office has been debunking similar theories since November. MLive has contacted Shirkey’s spokesperson for further comment.
In response to the WKHM comments, Department of State spokesperson Jake Rollow said Shirkey “continues to spread lies to voters and in doing so he threatens our democracy.”
“He’s admitted he should have done what we asked more than a year ago when we proposed legislation to allow sufficient time before Election Day to process absentee ballots, and he’s well aware there is no widespread evidence of wrongdoing, including ‘dead people voting,’” Rollow said.
Related: Fact check: Michigan officials deny counting ballots from dead people
The Department of State has a process to reject ballots of deceased voters, even if the voter cast an absentee ballot and then died before Election Day. On some occasions, databases may show a ballot received from a living voter born on Jan. 1, 1900, but that date is used as a placeholder date in some cases.
“Some who viewed this process wrongly believed voters were being registered to vote with fake birth dates,” the SOS website says. “This is not correct – the voters were not being registered (they were already registered), and the voter’s actual birthdate is known and kept by the election clerk in the voter file.”
Michigan rejected more than 15,000 ballots from the November election, including 3,469 from voters who cast absentee ballots but died before Election Day.
Others were rejected because they arrived after the 8 p.m. Election Day deadline, didn’t have a signature, the signature didn’t match or the voter moved to another jurisdiction before Election Day.
Related: 10 ideas Michigan officials have to change the state’s election process
Lawmakers in the Senate Oversight Committee and the House Elections and Ethics Committee are currently considering possible changes to the state’s election process.
Some Republican lawmakers have supported giving county clerks authority to immediately remove dead people from the Qualified Voter File. In previous testimony to the legislature, county clerks have suggested giving them the authority to remove dead voters from the file would make it easier to keep the list up-to-date.
Related: U.S. Capitol insurrection was a ‘hoax,’ Michigan Senate leader says in video
Also in the Tuesday WKHM interview, Shirkey responded to some of the more controversial aspects of the recorded video with Hillsdale County Republicans. He apologized for a remark calling Consumers Energy his “No. 1 enemy,” but doubled down on his use of the word “spanked” in reference to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
“I’ve had firsthand experience over this past week with a regular spanking by the media,” he said in the interview. “This ostensibly offensive word is a routinely-used term in our lexicon.”
Referencing a recent sports article in USA Today about the Super Bowl that used the term “spanking,” Shirkey added: “I really have nothing else to say about this, other than, you always find what you’re looking for.”
Asked about his use of the word “hoax” to describe the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Shirkey said he was referring to the fact that while Trump should have acted sooner and more forcibly on Jan. 6, “he did not cause the attack.”
“It’s going to take time to get to the bottom of what actually happened and why, that day,” he said. “We need a clear-headed, objective review of the facts. I’m actually encouraged that Congress is exploring a 9/11-type commission to do just that.”
Asked whether he needed to be more careful with his choice of words, Shirkey said: “Evidently, I do. That’s just something that I deal with on a regular basis. And I can.”
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