Ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick says 'no truth' to viral 'stolen election' post

Craig Mauger, The Detroit News on Mar 24, 2026

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LANSING, Mich. — Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said Tuesday there's "no truth" in a viral social media post that claimed he had inside knowledge of a Democratic plot to rig the 2020 presidential election in Michigan.

"It's fake," Kilpatrick wrote in a text message to The Detroit News. "Never happened."

A lengthy X post from an account named @JoshHall2024 alleged that Kilpatrick had stated Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson — two top state Democrats — "received millions of dollars from hostile foreign governments in order to rig the 2020 election in Michigan."

Some supporters of Republican President Donald Trump have maintained for years, without providing evidence to back up their assertions, that widespread voter fraud led to Trump's loss to Democrat Joe Biden in Michigan's 2020 race.

"Former Democrat Mayor of Detroit Kwame Kilpatrick says he has friends in Wayne County who oversaw the 2020 election who have informed him that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson personally ordered the shipment and counting of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent Biden ballots in the middle of the night on election night when it became evident that President Trump was going to win the state," @JoshHall2024 wrote.

In the post, @JoshHall2024 claimed Trump "was the lawful winner" of a "STOLEN election."

The post had been shared more than 10,000 times on X and viewed nearly 500,000 times as of Tuesday afternoon. Yet, Kilpatrick, the subject of the post, said there was no truth in it.

Kilpatrick was in a federal prison during the November 2020 election.

"I was fighting for my freedom," Kilpatrick said of his situation in November 2020, "and absolutely disinterested in Michigan politics in any form or fashion.

"There's no truth in it," Kilpatrick added.

The website Deadline Detroit first reported Kilpatrick's rejection of the viral post.

Before leaving office in January 2021, Trump commuted Kilpatrick's prison sentence, 16 years before Kilpatrick was to be released for running a racketeering enterprise out of City Hall.

Kilpatrick was sentenced in 2013 on two dozen counts of using his positions as mayor and state representative to carry out a decade-long criminal racket involving extortion, bribery, conspiracy and fraud.

During the 2024 campaign, Kilpatrick became a prominent supporter of Trump, who has spread theories about vast election fraud in Detroit, Michigan's largest city.

Meanwhile, in 2020, Trump outperformed his own result in Detroit from four years earlier. Overall, Biden received 94% of the vote in Detroit, and Trump 5% in 2020. which marked an improvement for Trump. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton got 95%, and Trump received just 3%.

A June 2021 report from a GOP-led state Senate committee found "no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud" in the 2020 election.

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—Staff Writer Robert Snell contributed.