Some uncounted ballots are on a table waiting to be processed at a vote counting center in Detroit, Michigan, Nov. 4, 2020.
A hand recount in Antrim County, Michigan, on Wednesday (Dec. 16) confirmed that the county falsely reported Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as the winner on Election Day night.
The recount gave President Trump 9,759 votes to Biden’s 5,959.
On Nov. 3, Antrim County officials said Biden received more than 3,000 more votes than Trump; two days later, they changed their story to say Trump won by about 2,500 votes; and on Nov. 21, the vote margin between the two changed for a third time, with Trump certified as the winner by nearly 4,000 votes. Local officials have blamed human error for these erroneous results.
Antrim County uses machines and software from Dominion’s voting system.
An audit of the machines by the Allied Special Operations Group, an outside group, found that the Dominion voting system “intentionally generated a large number of ballot errors” that resulted in ballots being sent for manual adjudication.
The audit report reads, “Intentional errors resulted in a large number of ballots being adjudicated – with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This led to voter or election fraud. Based on our research, we conclude that the Dominion voting system should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that Antrim County’s results should not be certified.”
State Election Commissioner Jonathan Brater countered in a filing with the court that the report draws “a series of unsubstantiated conclusions that attribute motives for fraud and obfuscation to routine election procedures or error correction procedures that are easily explained and imply, without explanation, that Michigan components of election software that were not used at all are somehow responsible for non-existent, or easily explained, tabulation or reporting errors.”
Earlier this month, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, announced that a “zero-margin risk-limiting” audit of ballots would be conducted in Antrim County.
Lori Bourbonnais of the Michigan Department of Elections told local reporters that preliminary results of the audit showed an increase of 11 votes for Trump and a decrease of one vote for Biden.
Officials also found three other ballots, including one for Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen.
“This is a very typical situation that we find in hand-counting. It’s not unusual to find one or two ballots in a precinct where there’s a difference between the hand count and the machine count. So what we’re seeing today is a very typical situation.” She said.
Another official told reporters at the recount that they were “confident” in the results and blamed “human error” for the misreporting on Election Day night.
The Trump and Biden campaigns have not responded to requests for comment.
According to the current certified results in Michigan, Biden won the election. But the state has seen a dueling electors for president.
Dominion CEO John Poulos answered questions from lawmakers during a hearing at the Michigan Legislature last week.
He said the machine’s procedures were supposed to be updated in October because of the rule change. However, Antrim County officials did not update all 18 tabulators, so some machines are using the new program and some are still using the old one.
In addition, officials later forgot to test the programs for logic and accuracy; a contracting company programmed the tabulators in October, again allowing memory cards with either the new or old versions of the programs installed to count ballots.
“If all tabulators had been updated as programmed, the errors described in the unofficial report would not have occurred.” He said.
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