Trump supporters are pointing to a glitch in the vote-counting software in a small Michigan county as evidence that votes for the president are being suppressed.
Due to a supposed glitch in vote-counting software in Antrim County, thousands of votes were switched from Trump to Biden, and from GOP Senate candidate John James to Democrat Senator Gary Peters.
Biden is winning in Michigan by 146,123 votes, with 98 percent of ballots counted. As a result of this, Biden has been declared the winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes by multiple news organizations.
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 continued, saying 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 Trump’s campaign shared her remarks on Twitter.
News outlet The Detroit Free Press has reported that the equipment used to count votes in Antrim County came from Dominion Voting Systems. Results of the ballot count are stored on computer cards at the precincts, then uploaded to another computer by county election officials.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, has said that it is not clear if human error or a glitch caused the votes to switch, which was uncovered because Democrat wins were incongruent with the county’s Republican leanings. The error was confirmed by a manual review.
Computer science professor at the University of Michigan J. Alex Halderman, an expert on voting machines, said “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.
Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Michigan by only 10,704 votes in 2016.