Antrim County was cited by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, as evidence of widespread fraud, and it remains the centerpiece of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Trump alledged a conspiracy saying 6,000 votes were stolen from him and moved over to Joe Biden. Which is actually the opposite of what happened.
Trump followed the narrative that a conspiracy of misinformation pushed by Phil Waldren, spokesman for The Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) that reported that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.
Michigan’s Secretary of State and Attorney General asked Professor J. Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan to perform an independent technical investigation and a forensic investigation of the incident. This investigation was to respond to the ASOG report allegations supplied by Phil Waldren. Specifically to answer several questions: What caused the errors? Was there evidence of an attack or other foul play? And had the errors been fully identified and corrected? In addition could similar problems affect other localities? And in summary what could or should be done to prevent such issues in the future?
In October, Antrim County changed three ballot designs to correct local contests after the initial designs had already been loaded onto the memory cards that configure the ballot scanners. When the changes were made, a small number of voters had already received absentee ballots with the initial designs. These voters were mailed the revised ballots, but some of the initial ballots had already voted and been sent in.
By analyzing data from Antrim County’s election management system (EMS) and the memory cards from its ballot scanners, Halderman was able to reconstruct the events that led to the initial erroneous results. He precisely accounted for the known discrepancies, and identifed the underlying causes.
Based on this analysis, Halderman disproved misinformation about the incident, concluding that it was not the result of a security breach or deliberate design features by Dominion, but rather a series of operator errors compounded by inadequate procedures and insufficiently defensive software design.
Originally, the Atrim County Clerk, Sheryl Guy, had ommitted one candidate for Village Trustee from the ballot cards. On the Mancelona Village ballot, one candidate (Eugene K. Kerr) was added to the Village Trustee contest. This contest changed from a vote-for three to a vote-for-two, so there was one fewer write-in blanks and no change to the position of any contest.
When Guy added that last-minute candidate for Village Trustee to the ballots, she failed to update the counting machines with the new parameters. As a result when the voting numbers began rolling in, double data dropped into the wrong columns. A little over two thousand Trump votes had been shifted to Biden’s column. Another error. Guy then entered the correct numbers directly into the central computer. But she hadn’t zeroed out the mistaken ones. So she had published a stack of both wrong and right totals. By November 6, the team of people working on the problem had stripped away all the compounded mistakes, rescanned all ballots and published the correct tally of votes and Trump won the County by 3,800 votes. The county board of canvassers examined the results and certified them.
Another problem began as a result of this. On Election Day, in addition to voting for President of the United States, a vote to open a Marijuana shop downtown was also on the ballot. The vote was 262-262 - a failure. However, the Dominion Voting machine could not read one ballet. After numerous attempts to get the machine to read the ballot, finally the clerks threw the ballot out and this produced a vote of 262-261 - a pass. A Real Estate agent by the name of Bill Bailey brought two lawsuits, one against the county for its failure and the second against Dominion.
As a result, for Bailey and his lawyer, the judge ordered, the plaintiffs could access and photograph the County’s central computer, the Dominion machines, thumb drives and memory cards. And access was granted right away, Bailey said. He told Guy a team was coming in the next day by private jet to perform the inspection. The same private jet that Patrick Byrne was funding the expenses for. As was in the Arizona audit, this audit was privately funded also.
The Antrim County Judge in Michigan quoted in his ruling, “Plaintiff argues that failure to include the damaged ballot in the retabulation resulted in the marihuana proposal passing and violated his constitutional right to have his vote counted. The temporary, let alone total, loss of a constitutional right constitutes irreparable harm which cannot be adequately remedied by an action at law.” He ordered forensic examination of 22 Dominion voting machines. Also ruled the untrustworthy Dominion machines flipped 6000 votes from Trump to Biden. And the Spiking of votes by Dominion happened all over the state.
So as uncanny of a result thought possible, a single ballot for legalization of Marijuana, that was rejected by a Dominion voting machine, caused a group of individuals, as yet unnamed, to arrive by private jet to perform a forensic audit. Which fueled a conspiracy myth that to this day is still fueling lies and misinformation for the Office of the President of the United States. And although this Judge authorized an"examination" of the Dominion voting machines, the State of Michigan never authorized nor conducted an audit of any kind. Any audit was privately funded, and would not have been certified by the State of Michigan.
Antrim outsources these ballot design steps to a service provider, ElectionSource, which sends the county an “election package” containing the election project, ballot designs, and election definitions. The county imports these into its EMS(election management system) and loads the election definitions onto memory cards. Townships insert the cards into their scanners and perform logic and accuracy (L&A) testing by scanning marked ballots and confirming the results.The Antrim County incident was not caused by a security breach. There is also no credible evidence that it was caused deliberately.
The incident in Antrim arose due to the county’s mishandling of last-minute ballot design changes, a circumstance that is unlikely to have occurred widely during the 2020 election.
J. Alex Halderman final summary noted and made clear this report is not a comprehensive security review of Antrim’s voting system. He noted opportunities for security improvements. The major discrepancies in Antrim’s results have been fully corrected. The final results match the poll tapes printed by the individual ballot scanners, and there is no evidence that the poll tapes are inaccurate.
Last minute ballot design changes, unreadable ballots, early mail out ballots with incorrect ballot designs, and human error are all part of our elections. We had over 3,400 counties with 189,000 precincts in the our last election. Each with a specific ballot design. Hundreds of thousands of County and poll workers work constantly to maintain a system that has worked for over 250 years. And each has a system of fact checking designed to correct errors.Conspiracies of misinformation, citizens like Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, and Lindsey Powell, and conspiracy headquarters like ASOG designed to bring down our system of Democracy are not a part of our election aparatus. This time that system worked and brought down that conspiracy. But to this day, some of our own elected Government officials are working to continue on with that conspiracy. It is difficult to get into the minds of those individuals who continue on with that fraudulent narrative. America must continue on, so our history will prevail.
A single unreadable ballot in this case did turn out to be significant. Some 6000 people voted for the President. Yet only 524 people voted for the Marijuana initiative. Even if everyone in the county had voted for that Marijuana initiative there is no guarantee the vote would not have been that close. It could have ended up 262-262 or 263-261.
J. Alex Halderman’s in his summary did say there could be improvements in the security of Atrims voting system. In the end though what specifically could be done to allow for a single unreadable ballot? Suppose that single ballot had been in the Presidential election, or another important election? Manually reading the ballot could violate the integrity of the election. But throwing out the ballot could also. Right now the procedure of the system is to throw out an unreadable ballot. That is a security improvement that should be updated. If a procedure to account for unreadable ballots is not updated, someday in some election it could have a bearing on the outcome of the election.
Human error will always be an issue in not only elections, but in ballot designs and tabulations as well. The fact that this procedure is so complicated shows the integrity of human perseverance to maintain free and fair elections and to preserve the American way of life, void of misinformation campaigns and narratives.
SOURCES
https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/30lawens/Antrim.pdf?ref=projectminnesota.com
https://time.com/6128812/the-steal-antrim-county-michigan/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/14/fact-check-michigan-did-not-authorize-forensic-audit-2020-election/5057526001/