A judge will hear arguments on whether to dismiss a lingering 2020 election lawsuit in Antrim County, Michigan, that has ensnared the attention of former President Donald Trump’s allies who still claim the presidential contest was rife with voter fraud.
A remote hearing is scheduled to take place on May 10 after Antrim County Circuit Judge Kevin Elsenheimer denied a motion by the plaintiff, William Bailey of Central Lake Township, to adjourn it, according to the Traverse City Record-Eagle.
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“The court has an obligation to review legal sufficiency issues when they are raised,” Elsenheimer said on Monday.
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Bailey, a Central Lake Township resident, filed a lawsuit against Antrim County last year to challenge a local marijuana retailer proposal that passed by a wire-thin margin after a retabulation that didn’t include three damaged ballots, but it has ballooned as his attorney, Matthew DePerno, argued that Dominion Voting Systems machines and software could have intentionally manipulated the election — claims repeatedly denied by the company and election officials.
Antrim County, which has about 23,000 residents, gained outsize attention after the November election when it was revealed that thousands of votes were initially and incorrectly tabulated in favor of President Joe Biden. The error was quickly corrected and has since been attributed to human error, not to inherent flaws in Dominion software. Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a self-identified Trump voter, has taken responsibility for that tabulation mistake prior to the election.
A hand-count audit in Antrim County found a deviation of just a dozen votes from the first tabulation, with 9,759 votes won by Trump and 5,959 going to Biden. Biden won the state of Michigan and its 16 Electoral College votes by roughly 150,000 ballots.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was allowed to intervene in the case on behalf of Antrim County, and Erik Grill, an attorney with the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, has argued that Bailey lacks standing because he is a resident of the township and not the village, and so he could not have voted on the marijuana proposal. Grill also argued that the lawsuit is moot “because Plaintiff has already been granted all of the relief he sought” while pointing out that, among other things, no local candidates requested a recount, and the results have been certified.
Elsenheimer also allowed DePerno to proceed with an “expert witness” list and 30 days for testimony to be submitted to rebut an analysis by J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, that was released by the Michigan Department of State and reaffirmed that human error, not Dominion Voting Systems machine software, led to early tabulation errors in Antrim County.
On the list is Russell James Ramsland Jr., a cybersecurity analyst and former GOP congressional candidate, whose Dallas-based cybersecurity firm, Allied Security Operations Group, performed what it called a “forensic audit” of the voting machines in Antrim County on Dec. 6 that led to an initial report concluding they were “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
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This prompted Benson to warn voters to be wary of a “misinformation campaign” by “individuals with no apparent technical expertise in election technology,” and Dominion CEO John Poulos blasted the ASOG report in a hearing with Michigan lawmakers, testifying that the findings were “categorically false” and released by a “biased group.” His company has filed multiple defamation lawsuits since the November election.
Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based consulting firm hired by the Republican-led Senate in Arizona to conduct an audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, is also on DePerno’s list.
