Library Board President, Now Council Candidate, Fabricated Public Service, Awards and Experience
To download Aidan Sova’s application to serve on the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission, including his resume, click below.
by P.D. Lesko
On Feb. 1, 2021, Mayor Taylor brought forward the appointment of Aidan Sova to serve on the City’s Human Rights Commission (HRC). On Feb. 16, 2021, City Council approved the Mayor’s appointment. Council member Travis Radina made the Motion to approve the appointment and his Motion was seconded by then Ward 4 Council member Elizabeth Nelson, both of whom possessed a copy of Sova’s application and his resume submitted in support of that application. Aidan Sova’s application materials, however, were peppered with easily identified fabrications.
On Feb. 18, 2021 the Michigan Daily reported that Sova had been selected by the then Chair of the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission and members of the Commission based on his application and resume:
“In November 2020, Sova was approached by Leslie Stambaugh, the chair of the HRC, offering him the position. In an email to The Daily, Stambaugh explained the draw to have Sova as an addition to their commission. ‘A position recently opened up, and the Mayor asked us to look over the applications to serve on the HRC that the City had received and make a recommendation,’ Stambaugh wrote. ‘There were many impressive applicants. The group of HRC commissioners who reviewed the applications believed that because of Aidan’s life and work experience…and age, he would bring a particularly valuable perspective to the commission.'”
However, Sova’s application and resume contained a variety of fabrications, including about his work experience. Sova has repeated those fabrications to the public and the media since 2017, including in his campaign to be elected to the Board of the AADL and in his current campaign to represent Ward 4 on Ann Arbor City Council.
Aidan Sova will tell you he’s the youngest Black candidate to be elected to public office in Ann Arbor (AADL Board in 2022). He is.
Aidan Sova also told the Ann Arbor Observer on June 8, 2026 in a candidate interview in support of his push to represent Ward 4 on Ann Arbor City Council, that his service on the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities was “life-saving work.” Aidan Sova’s campaign website About page states that, “at the state level, Aidan expanded his impact on the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities, where he drove efforts that successfully eliminated the COVID-19 mortality gap for Black Michiganders.” In Nov. 2022, after being elected to the Board of the AADL, Sova told the Daily Pennsylvanian, which published a feature on him, “During the pandemic, he joined the COVID-19 task force on racial disparities for the state of Michigan.”
In his resume submitted to support his application to serve on the Ann Arbor HRC, Sova includes under Leadership and Extracurriculars: “State of Michigan Coronavirus Community Action Task Force Member-Appointed by Lieutenant Governor (May 2020-June 2021).” That task force never existed, according to state records. By 2025, Sova was touting his appointment to and service on the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities (which did exist).
However, records from the State of Michigan show Aidan Sova was not appointed to that Task Force by Governor Whitmer in April 2020, when she created it and announced the members, nor is he listed among the present or past members of the Task Force in a 2023 Final Report. Bridge Michigan reported in Feb. 2023 on that Final Report from the Task Force to which Sova has repeatedly claimed he was appointed.
On pages 65-68 of the final report of the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities, there is a list of the current and past Task Force members, including a dozen people with MDs and Ph.Ds. There is a list of the Centering Equity Workgroup members that includes former Washtenaw County Racial Equity Office Head Alize Asberry Payne, but not Aidan Sova. The final report lists members of the Strategic Infrastructure Workgroup and the members of the Primary Care Connections Workgroup, Mobile Health Workgroup and the Data Subcommittee. More than 130 people worked to successfully eliminate the COVID-19 mortality gap for Black people in Michigan. Ward 4 Council candidate Aidan Sova has been taking credit for their work for years.
A State database which includes every person appointed to a State Board, Commission or Task Force does not include Aidan Sova. The database does not include Aidan Sova’s “Coronavirus Community Action Task Force.”
In public bios, media interviews, including as a candidate for elected office, Sova’s resume submitted in support of his application to serve on the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission (HRC), and obtained through FOIA, as well as public records, show that since as early as 2017, Aidan Sova has serially fabricated details about awards and public service. Despite doing so, (researchers suggest that perhaps by having done so) Aidan Sova landed both an appointed position and elected office.
Sova is now using that elected office as President of the AADL Board of Directors (and using the AADL’s facilities) to seek a seat on the Ann Arbor City Council. In the bio on his campaign website, Sova writes about himself in the third person that, “Under his leadership, the Board has maintained rigorous budget oversight.” Sova’s website also says: “I will bring my experience on the Library Board to guarantee our tax dollars are spent effectively and transparently.”
Elected in November 2022, between 2023 and 2025, AADL ran a deficit in two of the three years Sova has served on the Board of Directors, according to 990 federal income tax returns.
Politicians and Lies
Aidan Sova is not the first politician to land a political appointment through fabrications, to deceive the media and voters while seeking elected office. He is, perhaps, the youngest elected official in Ann Arbor to do so in order to climb the political ladder.
His real accomplishments are impressive and include a Master’s in Liberal Arts from the University of Pennsylvania (Dec. 2024), service as a policy advisor to the Executive Board of the University of Michigan Central Student Government for eight months between 2018 and 2019, and a one year stint (2019-2020) as the Asst. and then Exec. Dir. of the Association of Big Ten Students (ABTS). In that position, he did not “lead the 500,000 students of the Big 10” (HRC application).
So why state under ‘Work Experience” on his resume for the the HRC appointment that he was a current “Washtenaw County Human Rights Commissioner” and that he reported to “City Council” (the County has no stand alone Human Rights Commission), that he managed “100 staff members” and “hired all executive-level talent” at the ABTS? ABTS has no centralized, or corporate “boss” that hires for the Association, and was (and is) entirely governed and staffed by students. Why include founding and directing a consulting firm in 2019 (Boost Consulting Agency, LLC) that doesn’t exist in State of Michigan business entity records, and claim to have “sourced, recruited, and managed 5 staff members to assist with operations of that LLC?”
Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University. He is the author of Beyond the Big Lie. In a piece published in The Atlantic in 2024, Adair wrote, “For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency.”
Fact-checking politicians and public officials is left to voters and the media.
Sova submitted a bio for the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce website after his 2022 election to the AADL Board, and in that bio stated that he was “the Big Ten Academic Conference Executive Director at the University of Michigan,” a mischaracterization of his ABTS positions. That bio also claimed Sova “served on the Grow Jackson Board of Directors, [and] the State of Michigan’s Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities,” and that he was the “City of Jackson’s Youth Citizen of the Year.”
After reading Sova’s biography on the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce page, The Ann Arbor Independent obtained Aidan Sova’s application to serve on the Ann Arbor Human Rights Commission (HRC). That application included a resume that turned out to be full of easily identified fabrications. For example, in his resume under “Leadership and Extracurriculars,” Sova claimed that he was a current member of the Board of Directors at the nonprofit Grow Jackson beginning in 2021. He wasn’t, ever, according to public records.
Fabrications or Simple Mistakes?
Aidan Sova’s resume attached to his application to serve on the HRC lists under Awards “Time Magazine Rising Star Program Membership Recipient (March 2020).” Time Magazine’s official rising star program is the TIME100 Next, an annual list that highlights 100 emerging leaders shaping the future in business, entertainment, sports, politics, and science. The “TIME100 Next” list is released in Sept. of each year. Aidan Sova was not on the list, but Tyler Perry, Chief Justice John Roberts, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were.
Politifact’s Bill Adair says that for politicians, there is a calculus involved in lying to the electorate. Will the lies be exposed? Is the politician’s base so polarized that the lies will be overlooked? Could the falsehoods be passed off as simple mistakes?
In 2018, Italian scholar Alessandro Bucciol, a professor at the Università degli Studi di Verona, used data compiled by Bill Adair’s Politifact (2459 public claims made by 444 politicians—lies told by politicians), and published, “False claims in politics: Evidence from the US” in the peer-reviewed Science Direct. Bucciol writes, “In many cases it is likely that the speaker knows that what he says is false: Claims do not flow unexpectedly but are prepared well ahead…so that it is unlikely that falsehoods are simply mistakes.”
Certainly, Sova knew when he submitted his resume to the Mayor’s office to serve on the HRC, that when he was a college sophomore in 2019, and the volunteer Exec. Dir. of the Association of Big Ten Students (ABTS), a student-led coalition, he had not “hired, maintained all executive-level talent,” as his resume purported. He certainly knew as ABTS Exec. Dir. he did not “[o]versee all ABTS-related external communications and operations through the management of 100 staff members.”
Jake Griggs is a graduate of Penn State University. While a Junior, he was the Exec. Dir. of ABTS in 2019, when Sova was the Asst. Dir. of the coalition. Griggs described his work as the Exec. Dir. of ABTS in an interview. “So my main job is to manage the executive board. There are six of us, I believe. My main job personally is to keep in contact with the student body presidents when we’re working on initiatives, kind of collaborate between them. Yeah, I’m pretty much just like a big liaison between everybody.”
In 2016, another Penn State student served as the Exec. Dir. of ABTS, Samantha Geisinger. Like Griggs, in an interview Geisinger described the job of ABTS Exec. Dir. as one of managing the executive board and as a liaison: “I’m in charge of setting the agenda for the executive board and keeping all the schools in contact with each other. We have biweekly executive board meetings…and we basically discuss initiatives that we’re all working on.”
Certainly as a college freshman in 2018, Aidan Sova knew he wasn’t telling the truth when he told MSU Today he had (the year before) been the “Jackson County Youth Citizen of the Year” (the award doesn’t exist). Three years later, in his resume to serve on the HRC, he lists under Awards, “City of Jackson Youth Citizen of the Year” (the award doesn’t exist). In a 2021 Mlive article about Sova going to study in the Ivy League, Sova pointed out he “was one of the youngest members to serve on both the Washtenaw County Human Rights Commission, and Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist’s Coronavirus Community Action Task Force addressing racial disparities,” neither of which ever existed.
Sova added that, “There was a time when being appointed to statewide committees…might have sounded far-fetched, but it was the support from family and friends that made it all possible.”
In 2022, Dr. Christian L. Hart published a piece in Psychology Today titled, “Pathological Lying in Politics.” Dr. Hart studies the nature of deception. In his article, Dr. Hart tackled the question of whether politics attracts big liars, or creates them. Dr. Hart writes, “Dishonest politicians may regularly see the benefit of lying, feel like they can get away with lying, and see their lying as a necessary part of the job rather than a deep character flaw.”
Grifting?
A grifter is someone who uses charm, deception, and psychological manipulation to trick people (usually out of money).
Aidan Sova’s backstory he tells to the media and the public includes a variety of details: He was raised in Jackson in a single-parent home, an apartment he has described as “the size of two dorm rooms” (Mlive article) or “a college dorm room” (HRC application). In June 2026, Sova told the Ann Arbor Observer, “I was raised in a low-income, single-parent household, so I understand firsthand what it feels like to worry about being left behind by rising costs.”
As a freshman at Michigan State University in 2017, Sova told MSU Today, “I have the utmost respect for my mother for working insane hours so I could be well accounted for, keeping food on the table and showing me that one’s hard work can directly change the life of others.” In his 2021 HRC application, Sova said his mother “struggled to clothe, feed and support me.” In November 2022, Sova told the Daily Pennsylvanian, “It can be deeply vulnerable and scary to share about my own experiences with food insecurity.”
Sova, while running for the AADL Board, in an October 2022 interview with All About Ann Arbor said, “As previously noted, I spent the large majority of my life steeped in the suffocating effects of poverty and associated marginalization.”
One can quibble about whether his mother kept Sova “well accounted for and fed,” or whether he spent his life “steeped in the suffocating effects of poverty” despite the efforts of his mother, or both. Research provides a possible explanation for Sova’s serial falsehoods, but not an excuse for deceiving voters.
In 2025, the Annie E. Casey Foundation published research into child well-being, including whether children from low-income, single parent families are so impacted by socio-economic factors that they are more likely to lie. They are.
Sova paints his upbringing as singular and unique. However, more Black kids than not (Sova’s mother is white) are likely to live in single-parent households.
According to 2025 statistics from the Casey Foundation, “In the United States today, more than 23 million children live in a single-parent family. While this total rose over the last half century and currently covers about one in every three kids across America, this share has been holding steady at 34 percent or 35 percent for 15 years. Black and American Indian or Alaska Native kids are most likely to live in single-parent families with 64 percent and 50 percent of these children, respectively, fitting this demographic.”
In Ann Arbor, according to data collected by the Fed, single-parent households account for between 17 to 25 percent of all households with children, with about 16.9 percent of children residing in single-parent homes. This rate is significantly lower than the broader state average, 34 percent, and lower than the Washtenaw County single-parent household average of 24.7 percent.
Sova’s candidate platform for both a seat on the AADL Board and now City Council stresses to voters his childhood poverty and suffering, then highlights his accomplishments (including fabricated ones) in the face of adversity. It’s a compelling story, but one that has intertwined fact and fiction for the past half a dozen years.
In 2024, Politifact’s Bill Adair published a piece in Time magazine titled, “How to Make Lying Unpopular in Politics.” In that piece Adair writes, “But lying matters. It poisons our discourse, breeds cynicism about government, and makes it difficult to have serious conversations about the issues of the day.”
When contacted, several of Aidan Sova’s endorsers expressed dismay and shock when provided with details and evidence of his serial fabrications. However, none would speak on the record and none would say if they had second thoughts about their endorsements.
Similarly, Sova’s opponent in the Aug. 4 primary election, David Zeglen, did not respond to a request for a comment.
Aidan Sova was asked repeatedly to comment but has refused to explain the fabrications, or comment on why he claimed in media interviews and on his campaign website to have driven “efforts that successfully eliminated the COVID-19 mortality gap for Black Michiganders” through service on a State Task Force to which he was never appointed, and on which he had never served.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.