Election manager testifies that fake signatures on petitions were pervasive, unprecedented

Two former Republican gubernatorial candidates and a political consultant were among the witnesses at a preliminary examination Wednesday for a trio charged in connection with fraudulent nominating petition signatures that resulted in the disqualification of five GOP candidates for governor in 2022.

Former Detroit Police Chief James Craig and Donna Brandenburg, who were running for governor, and political consultant John Yob, who owns Strategic National, were among nine witnesses called by prosecutors with the Michigan Attorney General's Office during the daylong exam.

Shawn Wilmoth, 36, and his wife, Jamie Wilmoth, 37, both of Warren, and Willie Reed, 38, of Florida, appeared in 37th District Court in Warren, each facing more than two dozen charges, for the first day of their exam. Testimony resumes Thursday afternoon and is expected to go into Friday before Judge John Chmura.

State prosecutors filed charges in June. The Wilmoths and Reed are accused of operating a criminal enterprise that charged the campaigns more than $700,000 for valid signature collection, then delivered thousands of forged signatures on nomination petitions to eight of the campaigns.

How the fake signatures affected campaigns

Seven candidates provided with fraudulent signatures were disqualified from appearing on the ballot and one candidate withdrew, state prosecutors previously said.

Shawn Wilmoth and Reed face 27 counts while Jamie Wilmoth is charged with 25 offenses. The charges for all include conducting a criminal enterprise, false pretenses, computer fraud and election law forgery. Shawn Wilmoth and Reed also face larceny by conversion charges, accused of theft from the gubernatorial campaign of Ryan Kelley.

State prosecutors previously said Shawn Wilmoth is owner/operator of First Choice LLC and co-owner of Mack Douglas LLC and Reed is the owner/operator of Petition Reeds LLC and co-owner of Mack Douglas LLC.

The trio is accused of defrauding the 2022 gubernatorial campaigns of Craig, Brandenburg, Perry Johnson, Michael Brown and Michael Markey and judicial candidates Tricia Dare, John Cahalan and John Michael Malone.

The forgeries were detected by the Michigan Bureau of Elections and it was determined the campaigns of Craig, Brandenburg, Johnson, Brown, Markey, Dare and Malone had not met the qualifications to appear on the ballot.

The Michigan Department of State referred the matter to the Attorney General's Office in June 2022.

The Wilmoths and Reed sat next to each other in court, right behind each of their individual defense attorneys, who each had a chance to cross-exam each witness.

Four witnesses testified in person and five others, including Craig, Yob and state Bureau of Elections Regulatory Manager Adam Fracassi, appeared via Zoom. Prosecutors expect to call seven to nine additional witnesses over the next two days.

Cost per signature escalated

Some testimony was short, with witnesses confirming the hiring of First Choice LLC or Mack Douglas LLC to collect signatures; how much the company was to be paid for each signature collected, and the validity rate (70%-75%) in the contracts.

Brandenburg testified the rate started at $4.75 per signature with First Choice LLC but kept going up as Shawn Wilmoth said there were problems getting signatures. She said the cost went up to $11 per signature or more. She testified she also had volunteers collecting signatures and that the company was hired for verification.

Brandenburg said more than $100,000 was paid to the company. She testified she was, overall, trying to get 28,000 signatures even though she didn't need that many because the process was "clearly going off the rails" with the Board of Elections and she wanted to have more signatures than needed.

Dead voters and misspellings

Fracassi, whose testimony was the longest of the day, testified that the bureau had "never seen the volume" of possible fraudulent signatures that was seen in 2022. He testified the patterns and circulators of the petitions were the same across the petition sheets for seven candidates mentioned in court.

Fracassi testified that "flourishes" were consistent in the sheets. Some of the alleged signers died several years prior. There were misspellings or uncommon abbreviations. While voters often are in a rush, he testified, misspellings were repeated throughout the petition sheets — a red flag.

Fracassi testified the fraud was "so prevalent" and he had "never seen 70,000 signatures across 10 candidates" adding "every time we opened a new box" workers found more problems. He said the bureau tries to give the benefit of the doubt to voters and doesn't take lightly disqualifying signatures or candidates.

"It was something that gives pause … something that multiple people looked at," he testified, adding the bureau tried to validate as much as it could.

Dare, an Oakland County assistant prosecutor who sought a run for judge in 2022, testified that she checked to see whether some of the signatures were legibly signed, had complete addresses in Oakland County and had what seemed to be a correct date versus a wrong date or birthdate.

"We trusted the company we hired to do a certain task would do that task," said Dare, who testified she hired First Choice LLC. She hired the firm, she and her husband both testified, as she had only about seven weeks before signatures were due to the state.

Yob, who initially worked for Craig's campaign, testified he was hired by Johnson for his gubernatorial run and contracted with Mack Douglas LLC to collect signatures at $8 per signature, with more than $62,000 paid to the company.

Once news broke about problems, Yob testified he "could have cared less about the money at that point in time. I was much, much more angry and interested in the validity of the signatures to make sure that my client would actually be on the ballot."

He testified he has worked on hundreds of campaigns in the last 25 years, and "I have never seen anything like this before."

Shawn Wilmoth's attorney, Macomb County Assistant Public Defender Noel Erinjeri, questioned whether some witnesses checked the signatures or how they may have known they were fraudulent. Jamie Wilmoth's attorney, Susan Dunn, asked a few witnesses whether they had ever met her client. They had not.

The exam is to determine whether evidence is sufficient to sustain the charges. Chmura will rule after the hearing on whether the defendants will stand trial.

Shawn Wilmoth separately is charged with three counts of filing a false tax return for 2018, 2019 and 2020, the Attorney General's Office announced in November.

He is accused of failing to report or underreported income from the signature gathering firms and another on tax filings, according to a prior release. He faces three counts of failure to file/false return of taxes in that case.

Contact Christina Hall: chall@freepress.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @challreporter.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trio in court in fake signature scandal that disqualified 5 GOP governor hopefuls in 2022