Social media users have been sharing a graphic that suggests that there were thousands of fraudulent voter registrations in Detroit. This information, however, comes from a lawsuit filed in December 2019 that was resolved in June 2020 before the Nov. 3 presidential election.
The posts ( here , here , here , here ) appear to show a graphic from a Fox2 TV news report with the header, “Detroit Voter Roll Lawsuit. Filed by Public Interest Legal Foundation.” The graphic underneath says, “4,788 duplicate registrations; 32,519 more registered voters than eligible voters; 2,503 dead people registered; one voter born in 1823.” Captions on the posts include, “The walking dead have turned out to vote in huuuuuge numbers!! #VoterFraud” and “Right before your very eyes. #StopTheSteal”.
The statistics come from a lawsuit ( here , here ) filed against the City of Detroit in December 2019 by The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) (publicinterestlegal.org/). The lawsuit said that the City of Detroit had failed to reasonably maintain accurate and current voter registration records as required by federal law.
PILF said in a summary of the lawsuit that, amongst other concerns, the number of dead registrants aged over 85 in Detroit was 2,503, that the number of registrations flagged for duplicate and triplicate concerns was 4,788, and that one registrant was stated as being born in 1823 (here).
The Fox 2 report about the lawsuit came out in December 2019 (here).
The lawsuit was dropped on June 29, 2020, before the Nov. 3 presidential election, because the PILF said that the Defendants in Detroit and the Michigan Secretary of State had acted on the data provided to them ( here , here ). The PILF lawyers wrote, “Defendants have taken action on the list of likely deceased registrants provided by the Plaintiff. Further, almost all of the duplicate registrations that Plaintiff brought to Defendants’ attention have been corrected.”
Detroit City Clerk, Janice Winfrey, told Detroit News (here) that the case of the registrant being born in 1823 was a “typographical error.”
This claim was also fact checked by Snopes (here), Politifact (here) and Lead Stories (here).
Reuters debunked other false or misleading posts about the vote count in Detroit and Michigan state ( https:// reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-detroit/fact-check-republican-and-democrat-challengers-were-present-inside-detroit-count-idUSKBN27L2DR , https:// reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-video-journalist-detroit-ba/fact-check-video-shows-journalists-filming-gear-in-red-wagon-not-ballots-idUSKBN27L2UN , https:// reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-biden-vote-spikes-mi-wi/fact-check-biden-vote-spikes-and-county-recount-do-not-prove-democrats-are-trying-to-steal-the-election-in-michigan-and-wisconsin-idUSKBN27L2RL ).
VERDICT
Missing context. The figures are from a lawsuit that was filed in December 2019 and resolved in June 2020 after the City of Detroit took action to correct the registrations.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here .