Trump supporters are using a glitch in the vote-counting software in a small Michigan county as evidence that votes for the president are being suppressed.
Thousands of votes were switched from Trump to Biden, and from Republican Senate candidate John James to Democrat Senator Gary Peters in Antrim County due to a supposed problem with the vote-counting software.
Biden is beating President Trump in Michigan by 146,123 votes, with 98 percent of ballots counted, and because of this, multiple news organizations have declared the former vice president the winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes.
At a press conference on Friday, Michigan GOP Chairwoman Laura Cox said 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 also added that “since then, we have now discovered that 47 counties used this same software in the same capacity,” which equals out to more than half of Michigan’s 83 counties. She urged those counties to “closely examine their results for similar discrepancies.” Members of the Trump campaign, and the president’s supporters, have shared her remarks on Twitter.
The Detroit Free Press reported that the vote-counting equipment used in Antrim County is from Dominion Voting Systems. Ballot-count results are stored on computer cards at the precincts, then uploaded to another computer by county election officials.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, said that it is not clear whether human error or a glitch caused the votes to switch. The error was discovered because Democrat wins were incongruent with the county’s conservative leanings. The error was then confirmed by a manual review.
A computer science professor at the University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman, who is an expert on voting machines, said 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,” Halderman added.
President Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Michigan by only 10,704 votes in 2016.
