CLAIM: A report released this week in Michigan shows that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Antrim County, Michigan, are “deliberately designed with inherent flaws to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. This report is based on lies about a human error in Antrim County and about Dominion machines, according to government officials and local officials. The initial error in registering votes in Antrim County was isolated and was identified and explained by election officials. This was caused by the failure of a clerk to update media stations for certain tablets to reflect the correct voice content. It was not a machine problem.
THE FACTS: There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Election officials confirmed that there were no serious irregularities and that the election went well.
The election technology company Dominion Voting Systems also has no evidence votes switched or removed, used algorithms to weigh tuners unequally, teamed up with Democrats, of used foreign servers – despite repeated attempts by the president and his supporters to claim that it did.
Nevertheless, a deluge of false allegations surrounding Dominion circled back to Antrim County, Michigan this week start there on election night, when confusion about a clerk’s mistake led social media users to falsely blame the election management system that used the data.
The renewed attention to Dominion and Antrim County this week stems from a report released Monday as part of a lawsuit seeking to challenge the province’s election results.
The 23-page report – signed by a former Republican congressional candidate with a history of spreading misinformation about Michigan’s election – Dominion claims “was deliberately and deliberately designed with inherent flaws to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
The report claims that the outcome of the Antrim County election should not be certifiable because a forensic analysis of voting machines found that a ‘machine error was built into the voting software designed to create errors’.
The analysis is “critically flawed, filled with dramatic conclusions without any evidence to support it”, according to a joint statement Monday from the State Department of Michigan and the Attorney General’s Office in Michigan.
Antrim County officials agree in a press release Tuesday, saying: “An analysis that should have been based on facts was rather riddled with false and unsubstantiated allegations, unfounded attacks and misuse of technical terms.” ‘
Dominion made it clear his technology did not fail in Antrim County during the 2020 election. Officials thoroughly explain the human error that caused the small, Republican leaning province to temporarily report unofficial results that reflected a major victory for Joe Biden.
“It was requested by the clerk not to update media stations in some of the machines in Antrim County, an accidental human error,” the Michigan Department said in a statement. release. “Reporting errors are common and are always captured and corrected in the county, if not before, as in Antrim County.”
“There was no malice, no fraud here, just a human error,” Sheryl Guy, a graphist, told the AP. The table error has been corrected.
Several social media users, including Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the president himself, cited the report as “the province has a 68% error rate”, which he said was based on a review of the table books three days after election day.
The authors of the report did not explain all the errors they saw, or what they meant by ‘error rates’. Provincial officials told the AP they did not understand the number as they did not have the chance to look through the data.
The report, released Monday, also contains a slew of other denials about Dominion, which Dominion CEO John Poulos addressed in detail Tuesday in prepared statements to a Republican Michigan Senate committee investigating the election.
″“The disinformation campaign being waged against Dominion defies facts or logic,” Poulos said. “To date, no one has provided credible evidence of voice fraud or voices that turned on Dominion systems because these things simply did not happen.”
Following the release of the report on Monday, Foreign Minister Jocelyn Benson called the state election on November 3 “the safest in the history of our state”.
“If the Trump campaign had actual evidence of misconduct – or real suspicion of it – they could have requested a retelling of every vote in the state,” she said in a statement. “They have not chosen to allow shadow-based organizations claiming expertise to refute unfounded allegations of fraud in an attempt to mislead American voters and undermine the integrity of the election.
For further confirmation, nothing went wrong with voting tablets in Antrim County, according to the Michigan Department of State, the Michigan Bureau of Elections will complete a risk-reducing audit of all ballots there Thursday.
“It’s essentially a manual breakdown of each ballot that can be compared to the machine-tabulated results,” the department said statement.
“We are interested in transparency here,” Antrim County spokeswoman Jeremy Scott told the Associated Press. “Although we have confidence in the results, we want everyone to have confidence in the results.”
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