A statewide, risk-limiting election audit in Michigan, one of the states where the vote was contested by former President Donald Trump, affirmed results of the 2020 general election.
“This statewide audit process affirms what election officials on both sides of the aisle have said since November — that Michigan’s election was conducted securely and fairly, and the results accurately reflect the will of the voters,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced in a statement on Friday.
The results of our statewide audit affirm Michigan’s 2020 election results accurately reflect the will of the voters. The work of all leaders now is to tell voters this truth & move forward with data-driven election policy to advance the will of all voters.https://t.co/VQyxIBILTs pic.twitter.com/C6YTN6ptD6
— Jocelyn Benson (@JocelynBenson) February 12, 2021
She added hundreds of nonpartisan municipal and county clerks from over 1,300 jurisdictions participated in Michigan’s auditing process, with more involved officials than any audit ever conducted in the state.
Following the November election, several audits were conducted across different state counties to test the accuracy of the machine count and election results.
Clerks proceeded to hand count 18,000 ballots collected at random from around the state and found President Biden received more votes than Trump. It was one of the states contested by Trump and his allies, whose legal efforts pushing claims of widespread voter fraud were rejected by election officials and the courts. Michigan certified the results of its election in late November.
“Although a random sample of 18,000 ballots would not be expected to exactly match the percentages of votes cast for candidates out of all 5.5 million ballots, the closeness in percentages between the hand-reviewed ballots and the machine-tabulated totals provides strong additional evidence of the accuracy of the machine count,” the secretary of state’s office said in a news release obtained by the Detroit Free Press.
The tallies were within a fraction of a percentage point of the certified results, which showed Biden won the Great Lakes State by 154,000 votes. In Antrim County, where a legal fight dealing with voting machines is still playing out, an audit conducted in December netted Trump a mere 12 votes.
