Dear Patriot,

I stood on a porch in Detroit last week and showed a woman a photograph of her own absentee ballot return envelope from the 2020 election. She looked at the signature and said, "That's me right there."

Then I showed her a second envelope, issued to the same voter, at the same address, for the same election.

She looked at it for a moment and said: "That's not me. I don't know who that person is."

Here is the part I cannot get out of my head. She told us the City of Detroit had already contacted her about that ballot back in 2020, specifically because the signature did not match the one they had on file for her. The city already knew about the discrepancy, and that envelope was still received, still stamped, and never rejected.

Help me find out who signed it.

We did not obtain that document from a leak, a whistleblower, or a lucky break, but the slow way instead, and the slow way is exactly the reason almost nobody in America does this particular kind of work.

It took our team three to four years of Freedom of Information Act requests to pry these certified records out of the City of Detroit Law Department. That produced millions of pages, which my investigators went through by hand, the analog way, one envelope at a time, because the system is layered and complicated enough that hardly anyone ever reaches the end of it.

Here is what turned up: duplicate absentee ballot return envelopes issued to the same registered voters. We scanned the barcodes on those envelopes and found that the voter identification numbers matched perfectly, while the ballot numbers did not. On several of them, the two signatures look nothing alike, with one envelope signed in careful cursive and the other in an illegible scrawl.

So we did the thing that almost nobody in journalism bothers to do anymore, which is that we went and knocked on the doors.

One of those addresses turned out to be a burned out, abandoned building on Greenfield Road, where the local police confirmed that nobody has lived for years and the flooring was not safe enough to stand on. Somebody is still registered to vote at that address, and the records show that person cast a ballot in 2020 and again in 2024.

At another door, a man looked down at two envelopes with his own name signed on both of them and said, "That's illegal, man." Then he asked me if we could scrape one of them off.

A woman threatened to put her dog on me, and another man ordered us off his property, so we left. When our security guard could not determine whether a pit bull in the next yard was actually chained up, he walked toward the animal to find out, so that nobody else had to.

That is the job, and that is precisely what your money pays for. Keep us on those doors — give $35, $50 or $100.

Now let me tell you what I am not saying, because this matters to me.

I am not telling you that these envelopes prove two ballots were actually counted, because they do not. Some of these voters may simply have been mailed two envelopes by mistake and signed both of them without thinking twice, and one woman told us exactly that. We say so out loud, on camera, in the report itself.

What I am telling you is that these are certified public records, and the questions they raise deserve a real answer. So we have now filed a new request for the complete voter file, transaction history and audit history for every person in this investigation.

We never ask you to accept a theory or to trust a narrative, because we would rather show you the documents and let you decide for yourself. That discipline is the only reason this organization has survived everything people have thrown at it.

Here is why I need you today rather than next month.

America starts voting on September 19, the day the first ballots go out - less than three weeks away. The envelopes we are still reading right now are from the 2020 election, and I would rather not spend another four years filing paperwork to learn what happened in this one.

That is the entire idea behind sponsoring a volunteer journalist: trained eyes inside the room while it is actually happening, instead of a records fight six years afterward.

You cannot personally spend four years reading envelopes in a Detroit records office, but you can sponsor someone who will.

You fund the mission, my team takes the risks, and you and your family see the results with your own eyes. Are you in?

Thank you for all that you do, and please . . . stay tuned.

P.S. A man looked at his own name signed on two different ballot envelopes and asked me if we could scrape one of them off. That is where this country is right now, and the only thing that changes it is somebody who keeps showing up at the door with a camera and a stack of certified public records. Chip in $35 now and keep us on those doors.