“A foreign Wi-Fi device inside a tabulator,” the post said. Michigan's elections office says no incident was reported.

The claim went up on X on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, on the account of Patrick Colbeck (@pjcolbeck). Its text, in full: “ALERT: An alert poll worker in Michigan has detected a Wi-Fi signal prior to closure of the polls that appears to be connected to a foreign Wi-Fi device inside a tabulator.” The alleged detection was placed before the close of the polls on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3 — a signal, the post said, appearing to come from inside a machine that counts ballots. Colbeck works with the Election Crime Bureau, the bureau backed by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and is chief operating officer at Lindell Management.

The post carried a note of its own. Colbeck's post concedes that there are no EAC-certified tabulator configurations in use in Michigan which include internal modems — the internal hardware a built-in device would need. The claim travelled anyway. A repost by Lara Logan carried the claim to 239,900 views, by the count in NewsGuard's Reality Check newsletter of November 4, 2026.

Lead Stories put the questions to Colbeck directly, in a phone interview on November 4, and published its check the same day. Colbeck refused to identify which poll worker had detected the signal. He declined to name the agency involved, or who is investigating. What he said was that the claim had been given to government officials, and that they will be investigating.

Lead Stories took the claim to the Michigan Department of State — Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is the state's chief election administrator. The department's chief communications officer, Angela Benander, answered by email on November 4: “It's complete nonsense.” In a follow-up, asked whether anyone had reported such an incident to the department, she replied: “No.”

NewsGuard's Reality Check newsletter, also on November 4, reported the position of Michigan's Bureau of Elections on the machinery itself: ballot tabulators in Michigan are not connected to the internet while votes are being tabulated, so they are not capable of being connected to any Wi-Fi device while the polls are open. Lead Stories also contacted the FBI and the Election Crimes Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, asking about the claim and whether either agency was investigating it; neither agency had responded immediately.

This is a different claim from the touchscreen vote-flipping story this desk published on November 1 — a different allegation, about different machinery, in a different state. What the record holds on the evening of November 4, 2026, is this: a post that names no poll worker, no agency and no investigator; a state elections office that says no such incident was reported to it; a Bureau of Elections position that the machines are not online while they count; and a concession, in the post itself, that no certified Michigan tabulator configuration includes an internal modem. As of publication this evening, no agency has announced an investigation, and no supporting evidence for the claim has been published. If that changes, this story will be updated, and the update will be noted on our Corrections & updates page. The receipts are below. Read the receipts. Decide for yourself.