In the days before the August 5 primary election in the troubled city of Hamtramck, Michigan, surveillance videos caught several people allegedly stuffing the municipal ballot drop box with suspicious ballots.
An August 1 video shows two men in a car handling stacks of ballots and placing them into Hamtramck’s drop box during the day. In another video, a pickup truck arrives at the drop box after dark with three people inside. The driver gets out of the truck and crams stacks of ballots into the box but has trouble because the box is so full.
Stuffing drop boxes while no one watching for cheaters is a recipe for election corruption. That is why President Donald Trump announced this week he will lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots, which can be cast by using a drop box. Trump also wants to stop using voting machines and return to voting with paper ballots.
Big dumps of ballots are suspicious because Michigan election law allows ballots to be dropped off only by the individual voter, a member of the voter’s immediate family, or someone living in the voter’s home.
Local news reported that Abu Musa, an incumbent city council member who is up for reelection, appeared to be in both vehicles caught on video. But the identities of the people in the vehicles have not been confirmed by officials, and no charges have been filed.
Michigan State Police did confirm the videos are part of an ongoing investigation into election fraud related to residency of city counselors in Hamtramck, according to a report by WDIV TV Reporter Lauren Kostiuk. Michigan State Police did not respond to The Federalist’s request for information.
Musa received 1,129 votes, winning the primary with 13 percent of the vote. Residency is required to hold office as a city councilor. The weekly Hamtramck Review reports that Musa’s wife and two daughters live in another town, yet Musa says he lives in another home in Hamtramck and is not separated from his wife.
Musa and city councilor Mohammed Al-Somiri were named in a 2023 election fraud case but were not charged. Others named in that case are city councilors Muhtasin Sadman and Mohammed Hassan, who were charged last week for election fraud, specifically two felonies each: forging a signature on an absentee ballot application and forgery under Michigan’s election law, Michigan Public reported.
As Logan Washburn reported for The Federalist last year, investigative reporters at Project Veritas heard officials may be ballot harvesting and bullying people for their ballots in Hamtramck, so it investigated. Project Veritas contacted Musa and city councilman Mohammed Hassan and offered to connect them with blank ballots from immigrants who didn’t know how to fill them out, so the ballots would not go to waste. Neither man rejected the offer and both knew how to get the ballots counted.
Hamtramck is in the greater Detroit metropolitan area and has a population of 28,000. It became the first city in the nation to have an all-Muslim city council in 2015. The city has been plagued with so much corruption that WDIV TV made a timeline highlighting recent problems within city government.
In a similar case in Pennsylvania, three Muslim members of the Millbourne Council Board pled guilty to election fraud and received prison sentences for preparing fake ballots and stuffing them in the drop box.
And in Wisconsin, hundreds of ballots were allegedly stuffed in a drop box, The Federalist’s Matt Kittle reported.
Voting in person is the simple remedy to this kind of election fraud. As we see here, a surveillance camera is no deterrent to cheating. Municipalities that provide an unmanned drop box offer the means for corrupt individuals to vote more than once using fake or forged ballots. The U.S. managed to conduct elections without drop boxes and mail-in voting before COVID. For secure elections, we must stop providing this opportunity for fraud.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
