Michigan County Flips to Trump After Major Vote Tabulation Error Discovered
A Michigan county has flipped from a win for Democrat Joe Biden to one for President Donald Trump after the discovery of a reported software “glitch” and a manual recount.
“Officials with Antrim County posted updated results showing President Trump won the county with 9,783 votes making up 56.46% of ballots cast. Joe Biden earned 7,289 votes or 42.07%,” WLNS-TV reported.
Results in Antrim County published on Wednesday morning showed Biden winning by slightly more than 3,000 votes, with 98 percent of precincts reporting, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Trump carried the northwestern Michigan county over Hillary Clinton by approximately 4,000 votes in 2016.
Antrim County officials blamed the election software system, explaining that totals counted did not match tabulator tapes.
Software provided by a company called “Dominion Voting Systems” and used in the county is also used in 64 other counties across the Wolverine State, WLNS-TV reported.
However, a spokesperson for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told the outlet “the skewed results were the result of a ‘county user error’ not a software issue and there is no reason to believe similar errors with ballot counts happened anywhere else.”
Tom McMillin, a former state lawmaker from Oakland County and member of the state board of education, told the Detroit Free Press he noticed irregularities with the Antrim County vote tallies late Tuesday when he was reviewing the returns for board of education candidates.
“It just looked weird,” he said, noting Biden and other Democrats had far more votes than normal. “Two-thirds of the townships looked really messed up.”
In addition to Antrim County, a computer error in Oakland County near Detroit caused incumbent GOP County Commissioner Adam Kochenderfer to think he had lost his re-election bid, WXYZ-TV reported.
“I received a call from the Oakland County Elections Division telling me that there had been a technical glitch in several precincts,” Kochenderfer said in a Thursday Facebook post. “Instead of losing by 104 votes, I won by 1,127.”
“While I’m grateful for the outcome, we should conduct a thorough review of our system to prevent this from happening again,” he added.
“I’d like to thank the officials who caught the error and corrected the vote tabulation. And of course, thank you to the voters of our area for their support and confidence in me.”
Top election cyber experts told The Western Journal that voting software systems can be hacked and reprogrammed to skew vote tallies.
One thing all the electronic voting systems have in common is a removable drive or memory device, which engages in two-way communication with the database when results from each voting machine are uploaded.
Harri Hursti — one of the world’s foremost election security experts and star of the HBO documentary “Kill Chain: the Cyber War on America’s Elections” — explained that all these devices are programmed to organize and communicate the data to a central database.
“The memory cards actually have a programming side,” he said. “Programming can have a lot of logic. So the program can dynamically look [at] what is happening and decide on the spot what is needed to be done in this precinct on this machine” as part of changing the overall result.
According to these experts, the best way to verify the vote is accurate is to conduct random risk-limiting audits of election results, regardless of how large the margin of victory.
Such audits are conducted by doing a hand recount of paper ballots in various precincts around the state until a preset statistical measure of certainty is achieved when the reviewers can conclude the computer-tabulated election results reflect the actual votes cast.
While Trump was ahead in Michigan Tuesday night, Biden had taken the lead by Wednesday morning.
The unofficial results currently have Biden ahead of the president by approximately 146,000 votes.
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