ANTRIM COUNTY, Mich. — President Trump’s supporters are pointing to a small Michigan county as evidence that vote-counting software used in the state may undercut Trump’s number of votes — as the Trump campaign tries to make their case for victory.
Republicans point out that in northern Antrim County, thousands of votes were counted in error for Biden, and for Democratic Sen. Gary Peters instead of GOP candidate John James, Fox News reported.
Biden is ahead by 146,123 votes in Michigan with 98 percent of ballots counted. As a result, he has been declared the winner by several news organizations.
However, Michigan GOP Chairwoman Laura Cox said at a Friday press conference that “in Antrim County, ballots were counted for Democrats that were meant for Republicans, causing a 6,000 vote swing against our candidates. The county clerk came forward and said, ‘tabulating software glitched and caused a miscalculation of the votes.’”
Cox said that “since then, we have now discovered that 47 counties used this same software in the same capacity,” or more than half of Michigan’s 83 counties. She urged those counties to “closely examine their results for similar discrepancies.” Trump’s campaign circulated her remarks on Twitter.
The Detroit Free Press reports that Antrim County uses Dominion Voting Systems equipment. Results are stored on computer cards at precincts, then uploaded to another computer by county election officials.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, told the Free Press that it’s unclear if human error or a glitch caused the error, which was discovered because Democratic wins were incongruent with the county’s conservative leanings. A manual review confirmed the error, Fox reported.
University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, a voting machine expert, told the Free Press that “it’s plausibly human error, but if a simple screw-up could cause these problems, that sounds like a technical design flaw.”
“It’s natural to wonder whether similar problems could have occurred in other jurisdictions that use the same machine. Fortunately, even if the county hadn’t noticed, this would have been caught and corrected during Michigan’s normal canvassing procedures, when they compare the results to the paper tapes from the machines,” he added.
Trump won Michigan by just 10,704 votes in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s path to a second term appeared bleak Friday, with unofficial vote counts in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania tilting toward Biden. If those results hold, Biden will become president-elect.
