Muhith Mahmood was sworn in as mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, on Sunday afternoon. The video of the ceremony shows him struggling visibly through the oath, halting at multiple words, with the administering official guiding him through the language like a parent helping a first-grader sound out a reading assignment.
The oath is thirty-seven words long.
As 100 Percent Fed Up reported, Mahmood's path to the mayor's office is a story all by itself. He originally lost the November 2025 election to Adam Alharbi by 11 votes. Then 37 absentee ballot envelopes were found in the city clerk's office the day after the election. Two of those ballots were ultimately disqualified. Thirty-five were counted. Thirty of them went to Mahmood.
Read those numbers again slowly. Thirty-seven envelopes discovered after the count. Thirty of the valid ones break for a single candidate. The final certified tally: Mahmood 2,089, Alharbi 2,077 — a 12-vote margin built almost entirely on ballots that materialized from a clerk's drawer.
Alharbi fought the result for nearly a year. His attorney, Nabih Ayad, argued that Mahmood didn't meet the city's residency requirement — and with reason. Mahmood owns multiple residences, and his wife and children live in Troy, not Hamtramck. Wayne County Circuit Judge Kathleen McCarthy ruled on October 30 that Mahmood satisfied the residency requirement, clearing the way for the Sunday swearing-in. Alharbi's legal options ran out. Mahmood walks into the mayor's office Monday morning.
The residency question matters beyond the legal technicality. A mayor whose family lives in a different city is a mayor who goes home to a different city. Hamtramck residents elected someone whose primary domestic life happens somewhere else, and the courts said that's fine as long as the paperwork checks out.
But the swearing-in video is what's going viral, and the reason is obvious. The oath of office isn't a speech. It isn't a policy paper. It's a short, standard set of words that every mayor in every city in America recites on their first day. The expectation that an elected official can deliver it fluently isn't xenophobia. It's the minimum baseline for a job that requires communicating with constituents, negotiating with city councils, and representing a municipality in public.
Hamtramck has been a flashpoint for these questions before. The city's demographic transformation has been well documented, and its politics reflect that shift. None of that is new. What's new is a swearing-in video where the incoming mayor visibly cannot get through the ceremonial language of the office he just won.
Mahmood won by 12 votes, from ballots found after Election Day, while living with his family in a different city. He takes office Monday.
