North Michigan News

A hand recount of the votes in Antrim County confirmed that President Donald Trump won the county after it had previously been reported on Election Night that President-elect Joe Biden had won the county.

The final count for the votes in the county was 9,759 for Trump and 5,959 for Biden. 

The results in the county have been all over the place, first listing Biden as the winner by 3,000 votes, then saying Trump won by 2,500 votes. A third change to the tally came two weeks later when they certified that Trump had won by nearly 4,000 votes.

When the error first occurred, county officials blamed it on human error. An outside group has since conducted an audit on the machines, which are by Dominion Voting Systems, and found that there was a high number of errors on ballots that caused a number of them to enter the adjudication process.

“The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail,” Russel Ramsland Jr., the co-founder of Allied Security Operations Group, noted in a report on the audit. “This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.”

However, Jonathan Brater, the director of elections in the state, said there needed to be a more detailed analysis of the report.

“Although a more detailed analysis of the report must be conducted with an individual with technical expertise, it is apparent to me that the report makes a series of unsupported conclusions, ascribes motives of fraud and obfuscation to processes that are easily explained as routine election procedures or error corrections, and suggests without explanation that elements of election software not used in Michigan are somehow responsible for tabulation or reporting errors that are either nonexistent or easily explained,” Brater said in a court filing.