In March of last year, the senior election official in this small Michigan town says she received an unexpected call.

A Republican state senator demanded access to voting equipment after supporting former President Donald Trump’s falsehood about a rigged 2020 election.

Daire Rendon, a fervent supporter of Trump’s bogus accusations of widespread election fraud, informed the clerk, Sheryl Tussey, that she wanted to perform an audit and required access to the vote tabulator the town employs to handle votes.

Tussey turned down the request, the latest in a multi-state campaign by Trump supporters to get unlawful access to voting systems in order to spread conspiracy theories about manipulated voting machines. Eight such vulnerabilities were discovered by Reuters on April 28.

Several others have surfaced since then, including one in Markey, a lakeside town of approximately 2,300 people in conservative and sparsely populated Roscommon County, which heavily favoured Trump in 2020.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and the Michigan State Police have been investigating illegal access occurrences in several counties across the state, which voted for Trump in 2016 and Democratic Vice President Joe Biden in 2020.

The mistaken idea that state-ordered voting-system updates or maintenance would remove proof of suspected fraud in the 2020 election lies behind multiple hacks and efforts to access vote tabulators. The capacity of voting systems to preserve data from previous elections is unaffected, according to state election officials.