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.
Nearly four years later, the mayhem at the TCF Center may have faded from popular memory — but it is burned into the minds of many election officials, lawyers and poll watchers. On the left, it’s a terrifying example of a pro-Trump mob that nearly brought the democratic process to a halt. On the right, activists continue to say vote counting at the TCF Center was the “real insurrection” and have spent years organizing around the debunked claims.
What happened in Detroit opens a unique window into how vigilante volunteers, misinformation and distrust in the election system can damage democracy — and it offers a road map for what could happen this year. Trump is again telling his followers that he can lose only if there’s massive fraud, directing his ire at majority-nonwhite cities in critical swing states.
“I’m here only because they cheat, and they cheat in this state, especially in Philadelphia,” Trump said at an event in Erie, Pennsylvania, just last month. “Philadelphia’s out of control. Detroit is out of control. Atlanta is out of control.”
The Republican National Committee, which is co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law, has promised to field an army of poll watchers targeting cities with majorities of Democratic voters. It’s the second consecutive presidential election in which the RNC is free from federal restrictions on coordinating poll watchers that were established in 1982. “Our unprecedented election integrity program has recruited over 200,000 volunteers to Protect the Vote — these patriots have volunteered their time to bring transparency and accountability to our election process,” Danielle Alvarez, senior adviser for the Trump campaign and the RNC, told NBC News.
How this will play out on Election Day is unknown. But an NBC News investigation can now report the extent of the Republican Party and Trump campaign’s involvement in the TCF Center ordeal in 2020 — and what the party plans for poll watchers next month.
An NBC News analysis shows dozens of Trump supporters, including people linked to the Trump campaign, played roles in the unrest at the TCF Center — more than was previously known. Among them were five campaign-linked activists who held signs outside the TCF Center encouraging the crowd to chant “stop the count,” indicating that Trump himself wanted them to do so.
And NBC News has obtained a video of a training session in Michigan for 2024 poll watchers showing the RNC is giving volunteers who echo Trump’s claims of widespread fraud the tools to challenge votes and few guardrails on what makes a challenge legitimate.
“Detroit is always going to be our tier one,” Morgan Ray, the RNC’s director of election integrity in Michigan, told hundreds of supporters in the training session.
Lost amid Trump’s dire warnings about fraud in swing-state cities is that he performed better in Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee in 2020 than in 2016.
Trump’s own head of Election Day operations, Mike Roman, acknowledged that inconvenient fact. In an email exchange with a campaign lawyer right after Election Day in 2020, Roman wrote that “the margin was higher” for Trump in those three cities.
He added, “Not sure that satisfies the narrative.”
Livid and livestreaming
Just before 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, Trump gave a speech at the White House falsely claiming that he had won.
Around the same time, Kellye SoRelle, a Texas attorney volunteering for Lawyers for Trump, was “camped out” in a car outside the TCF Center. With her gun and her purse and “pretty much” still in her pajamas, she started recording what would become a viral video, she later told congressional investigators.
SoRelle, who told investigators the RNC paid for her travel to Detroit, recorded a man unloading a black case from a van into a red wagon and taking it into the TCF Center around 2:40 a.m. The case “looks like one of those lockboxes,” SoRelle said in the video, suggesting it contained ballots. “Wish I could tell.”
Soon, her suspicions were all over Twitter and right-wing media. Eric Trump, the president’s son, tweeted about the video. SoRelle’s video got over a million views within a single day.
In reality, as WXYZ-TV of Detroit reported hours after the video had gone viral, it showed the station’s cameraman taking his gear into the TCF Center to cover the unfolding story. But it was too late.
“The Steal is on!!” Roman, a senior Trump campaign official, tweeted at 2:07 p.m. ET. He included a video purporting to show Republican observers being removed from the ballot-counting operation at TCF.
The relationship between the mostly Black poll workers, known as “election inspectors” in Michigan, and the mostly white Republican poll monitors deteriorated. Democrats and nonpartisan poll watchers said in sworn statements and interviews that the Republicans and those affiliated with a conservative group known as the Election Integrity Fund and Force were disruptive and combative.
Politically loaded fights over mask-wearing and social distancing because of the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. Some Republican challengers “refused to keep their masks on and were defiant when challenged. I would give a warning and they would ask, ‘Who do you think you are?’” DeRone Buffington said in a sworn affidavit, signed a few weeks after the election.
Buffington, who oversaw poll watchers and challengers at the TCF Center for the Detroit Department of Elections, said he had to remove 15 to 20 people on Nov. 4. Some “were badgering poll workers, demanding their names, political and religious affiliations and one challenger even threatened someone with physical violence,” he said. Others were “literally breathing down the necks of poll workers.”
The Republican monitors — some of whom received just minutes of training after having seen the call to action online — wrote in their own affidavits that they felt poll workers weren’t letting them properly observe the counting and that they couldn’t accurately watch for the fraud they expected.
Around 2 p.m., the situation escalated, as word began to spread that the Trump campaign was filing a lawsuit to stop counting in Michigan.
Officials and reporters present said there were hundreds of poll monitors in the space when officials declared that the room was over capacity. More Republican would-be monitors were kept outside the main hall in a large room, able to observe only through large glass windows, fueling the increasingly rowdy crowd’s suspicions that something was amiss. They pulled out phones and started recording.
A young woman in a black jacket with a fur-lined hood pounded on the glass windows and helped lead the pro-Trump crowd in chants of “stop the count!”
Later, she went toward the exits and held up a sign to the Trump supporters protesting outside the center: “PREZ TRUMP WANT’S U TO CHANT ‘STOP THE COUNT’”
'Make them riot'
Even as Trump and the RNC prepare for another election, the role their staffs played in stirring up the chaos at the TCF Center and spreading it to reinforce bogus fraud claims is still coming into focus.
Special counsel Jack Smith has made it a central part of his case that Trump illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election, leaving breadcrumbs in court filings to the identity of a key Trump campaign staffer who, according to Smith, “encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction” in Detroit to help Trump win.
That unnamed operative, Smith alleges, texted a Trump campaign lawyer in Detroit telling him to “find a reason” to file litigation “even if itbis,” which appears to be a typo for “even if it’s bs.”
He later texted the lawyer: “Make them riot. Do it!”
Smith’s description of the campaign operative matches up with Roman, who has been charged separately in election-related cases in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin and has pleaded not guilty. The length of the redactions in Smith’s filings also matches the number of characters in his name. Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment.
NBC News has also reviewed evidence compiled by a group of citizen investigators that identifies dozens of Trump supporters who contributed to the chaos at the TCF Center, including at least 14 people who had official roles in the Trump campaign, the RNC, the Michigan GOP or Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee of those three entities.
That evidence, compiled using the same type of open-source research techniques deployed by online “sedition hunters” who have helped the FBI identify hundreds of Jan. 6 riot participants, has been provided to federal law enforcement officials, NBC News has learned.
Among those identified was Chloe Waszak, the woman in the black jacket who held up the “stop the count” sign, purporting to pass a message from Trump to the crowd. Waszak was on the RNC’s payroll and had been praised by Ronna McDaniel, then its chairperson, as “one of the strongest members” of the Trump Victory team in Michigan. Waszak tagged Trump on Twitter that day, writing that she was “here in Michigan fighting for you & will be as long as it takes!” She didn’t respond to a request for comment, but her father confirmed she was in Detroit and “was ushered out and everything else by the police.”
Four others with links to the Trump campaign stood with Waszak at the doors, holding signs that encouraged the crowd to chant “stop the count.” Parker Maddock and Parker Shonts, who are married, worked for Trump Victory. Kolby Thompson, a regional field director for the Michigan Republican Party at the time, can be seen on video earlier pounding on the interior windows overlooking poll workers. And Daniel Gustafson, who worked for the Michigan Republican Party and now works for the RNC, was seen pounding on the inside windows.
A Republican poll challenger, Ken Licari, who streamed live on Facebook from the TCF Center hallway screaming for supporters to “Get down here!” recently got a campaign job. He tweeted in May that he had been hired as Trump’s regional director for Macomb County, Michigan. He declined to comment.
Near Licari was Parker Maddock’s mother, Meshawn Maddock, a conservative activist with the Michigan Conservative Coalition and a Trump delegate. She used a microphone with a portable speaker to help lead the hallway crowd monitoring poll workers through the windows in a chant of “stop the count!” and posted from the center on social media. She was later indicted and accused of signing on as a “fake elector,” falsely asserting that Trump won the state, and pleaded not guilty. She didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Meshawn Maddock was one of several people involved in the TCF unrest who went to Washington for Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021. There, Trump again made false claims about Detroit, saying turnout was 139% in the city. This year, Maddock is set be a Michigan delegate to the Electoral College if Trump wins.
SoRelle, the Lawyers for Trump volunteer who recorded the viral camera equipment video, was with Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes outside the Capitol on Jan. 6; he’s serving 18 years on a seditious conspiracy charge. SoRelle recently pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for her actions that day and a felony for conspiring to delete evidence after the Capitol attack.
At least two other people who went to protest outside the TCF Center after the election were later convicted of Jan. 6-related crimes. Michael Foy is serving three years for assaulting officers with a hockey stick. Robert Schornack received 28 days for entering and remaining in a restricted building, and he admitted that “there wasn’t any” proof of fraud in Detroit.
Last month, Meshawn Maddock posted a photo on X that showed her at the TCF Center four years ago. Through a panel of glass, she scowled and held up her phone — emblazoned with a “TRUMP 2020” logo — appearing to record poll workers counting the votes inside. Her post was accompanied by two words:
“Never again!”
Elections officials feel the same way.
“At this time in 2020, none of us could have anticipated just how far people would go to try to disrupt the process, just how violent things could potentially become,” Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, told NBC News last month. “Now we’re a bit more seasoned as to how far people could go, and so we’ve got more plans in place to anticipate those types of disruptions.”
Officials across the U.S. said they’re laser-focused on identifying and preventing disruptions at the polls and ballot-counting operations, evaluating their procedures for anything that might cause a misunderstanding — boxes are being labeled, and routine actions are being narrated on livestreams. Michigan has put out new guidelines for poll challengers, too, notably barring them from challenging specific ballots during absentee ballot counting.
'We all know what happened in Detroit'
This fall, another army of poll watchers is going to Detroit and other cities around the country.
The RNC has long declined to share what it teaches poll watchers behind closed doors, but NBC News has obtained a recording from inside a training session in August, providing a window into the tools it’s giving hundreds of supporters.
“Having Republican workers and challengers at these locations presents a very big deterrent,” Ray, the RNC’s election integrity director in Michigan, told volunteers in the training session. “Having our folks at these locations, it’s a big deterrent.”
Slides briefly explained the election process and state election laws before outlining how to challenge voters, their ballots and the counting process. “Your No. 1 function is to monitor the election to make sure that proper voting procedures are being followed,” Ray said.
Some of the advice was concrete and specific: Make sure the tabulators are at zero at the start of the day and that voter IDs are being checked, Ray advised. Challenge all voters who want to vote in person but who the poll book says have already voted absentee.
From there, the guidance got vaguer: Poll challengers can challenge a voter if they have a “valid reason” to believe the voter isn’t a citizen or 18 years old, isn’t registered or doesn’t live where the voter is registered to vote, Ray said. She suggested using the acronym “CARN” to help voters remember the categories — citizenship, age, residency and not registered.
But Ray offered no details about what those “valid” reasons might be, even as attendees mentioned baseless fraud claims, such as that voting machines in 2020 were programmed to steal votes or that thousands of mail ballots appeared fraudulent. The training session’s only caution was that poll monitors follow the law, be courteous and not make defamatory accusations of fraud.
The RNC plans to target Ann Arbor, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Kalamazoo, Muskegon and Warren, Ray said, listing Michigan cities with significant populations of Democrats.
“If you guys are comfortable in these locations, we certainly need you guys there,” she said.
The RNC is using right-wing celebrities to recruit volunteers, like Jack Posobiec, well-known for spreading the false “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, and Arizona Senate nominee Kari Lake, a prominent election denier.
“We have to keep our eyeballs on the whole system, and we know why,” Lake said at the August training session.
The RNC isn’t the only organization training poll challengers and activists in Michigan: The Election Integrity Fund and Force, which sent many volunteers to the TCF Center in 2020, is also hosting training sessions, giving combative scripts to eager attendees.
In a video of an Election Integrity Fund and Force training session in July obtained by NBC News, organizers offered a suggested script for challengers dealing with poll workers who “deceive” them: “I believe you have not fulfilled your legal obligation to correct this problem, which exposes you to criminal prosecution unless corrected.”
In a text message, Sandy Kiesel, the organization’s executive director, confirmed it was training volunteers.
“The bedrock of a free and fair democracy is the citizens doing their civic duty of participating as poll inspectors, poll challengers and other oversight positions,” she said.
Michigan conservatives have spent the last two years organizing around election issues, former Trump election lawyer Cleta Mitchell said. Activists have begun deploying amateur voter list maintenance programs, including the Mitchell-linked EagleAI, that could be used to challenge voters’ eligibility based on public records, even as experts warn the data is inadequate to make such judgments.
“If we’re going to save our elections and save our country, we have to get involved. We can’t just be angry about it. We have to get our hands dirty,” Mitchell said on “The Tudor Dixon Podcast” in June.
At the August RNC training session, an attendee asked what would happen if the events at the TCF Center repeated themselves. Ray’s answer was cautious.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to Detroit. We all know what happened in Detroit in 2020, right? There was a whole lot of chaos. There wasn’t a statewide program really in effect. So, folks, you know, when they saw things, they either didn’t necessarily understand the process, they didn’t know who to report to. It was kind of hot mess,” she said.
The party organized and didn’t have the same issues during the 2022 midterm elections, she said, before she turned back to the mission.
“Am I here to say that that will never happen again?” she said. “No, because, you know, it very much could.”
