How Trump allies stoked election chaos in Detroit in 2020 — and what's planned for 2024
What happened in Detroit in 2020 offers a unique window into how vigilante volunteers, misinformation and Trump-fueled distrust in elections can be weaponized.
At 10:04 a.m. the day after the 2020 election, President Donald Trump tweeted he was “leading” in the vote count in several “Democrat run & controlled” states — until, that is, “surprise ballot dumps” took those leads away. The implication that something nefarious was happening was categorically false. But primed by months of Trump’s baseless warnings about massive voter fraud and his false claim hours earlier that he’d won the election, Michigan Republicans answered the call.
They hurried to the convention hall in downtown Detroit, then known as the TCF Center, where more than 170,000 mail ballots in America’s largest majority-Black city were being counted. Millions had voted by mail for the first time in 2020, and the new processes in Michigan seemed foreign to them.
What followed was chaos. Trump supporters furiously alleged a campaign of fraud when none existed. When officials declared that the room was over capacity and stopped letting Republican and Democratic poll observers in, Trump’s backers felt their fears were validated: They started arguing with police and election officials, banging on windows and chanting “stop the count” outside a room of poll workers tabulating military ballots.
Police eventually quieted the furious demonstrators, leaving the poll workers — many of them young first-timers, recruited from churches and Black sororities and fraternities — determined to finish their work.
“This one young lady pulled me to the side and she said, ‘Mr. Baxter, I just want to let you know that we are with you. We are not in Selma, Alabama. It is not 1958. Nobody’s going to steal this election. No, sir,’” said Daniel Baxter, the city’s former elections chief, who ran absentee ballot counting at TCF.
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