Judge Orders Michigan County to Pay $10,000 to Election Integrity Group Over FOIA Practices

It took over one year of wrangling and a lawsuit, but the Michigan Grassroots Alliance (MGA), an election integrity watchdog group, has gotten what it sought—a segment of video surveillance tape that may serve as evidence in an investigation of the handling of voting results on election night in 2022 by some county election officials.

In a properly functioning Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, obtaining the tape should have taken about two weeks. Instead, it took nearly 13 months.

Finally, on Sept. 7, the matter was settled in a Wayne County Circuit Court but not before the group’s representative, Patrick Colbeck, was given the bureaucratic runaround.

Besides, it isn’t the county’s money. They are paying taxpayer’s money. No skin off their noses.

There needs to be a change. Government employees make these decisions knowing full well what the law is. They should be held personally responsible and should pay with their own money. Additionally, they should lose their jobs and pensions. One strike and you’re out. If anyone worked in a private business that was sued and the business lost, you know they will be fired.

Back in the day some people didn't mess around.
The parallels of the situation, described below, with today's scandals are so close that you could swap out dates and names and still portray what's going on now. Voter fraud, among other things.
Right up to the solution, which would be a tough row to hoe today.

"The Battle of Athens, also known as the McMinn County War, was a rebellion led by citizens in Athens and Etowah, Tennessee, against the local government in August 1946."

The Battle of Athens: An Obscure American Revolution

Battle of Athens, TN AFtermath

Excerpt from the link:
Enter the villain of this story, Paul Cantrell. Born in 1892 in Etowah, Cantrell came from a wealthy family. He and his siblings owned a lumber company, a motor company, the local water, light, and power utility, and a bank based in Etowah. There were few business deals in McMinn County that the Cantrells did not have a hand in. But Paul Cantrell’s ambitions shifted away from enterprise and towards politics. From the Civil War onwards, McMinn’s political offices were mostly held by Republicans. But by the 1930s, Tennessee increasingly came under the control of the Democratic party thanks, in part, to the political machine of Edward Hull Crump, which controlled much of Tennessee, including McMinn. Thanks to Crump’s backing, Cantrell ran as the Democratic candidate for sheriff in 1936. As was often the case in the rural South, the position of sheriff was the most critical position in McMinn, even more so than the town mayor or other local officials. Cantrell defeated his Republican opponent by a very slim margin. Citizens of McMinn were suspicious of foul play in the election, but they lacked concrete evidence of Cantrell’s alleged fraud. Because of this, the election came to be known as the “vote grab of 1936” among the citizens of McMinn.

It’s great that Wayne County extorted thousands of dollars for a digital public record it would cost at most one hour of work to locate, duplicate, and put it on a portal the applicant could access. The fee should have been about $100 if anything.

The killer is that the County was charging for an estimated 125 hours to REDACT the video evidence to excise their own potentially criminal behavior.

The court required the County to cough up the UNEDITED video. Will be interesting to see if that happens and what was on it — the County obviously knew it revealed something that threatened their interests.

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