A detailed audit of ballots cast in Antrim County, which has drawn interest from the Trump legal team due to mishaps with Dominion voting equipment, will be included in a sweeping post-election review process across the state of Michigan.
“The Michigan Bureau of Elections released preliminary plans for the most comprehensive post-election audits of any election in state history, including a statewide risk-limiting audit, a complete zero-margin risk-limiting audit in Antrim County, and procedural audits in more than 200 jurisdictions statewide, including absentee ballot counting boards,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office said in a Wednesday statement.
Her office said that the statewide risk-limiting audit was “long-planned” and will involve workers hand-counting thousands of random ballots from across the state. The first steps for that audit are already underway, and Benson’s office expects it to be completed by mid-January.
Additionally, a zero-margin risk-limiting audit of the presidential election will be conducted by the Michigan Bureau of Elections and county officials in Antrim County in December. The state described the Antrim County audit as “essentially a hand tally of every ballot, which can be compared with the machine-tabulated results.”
Although the risk-limiting audit was planned, it is unclear if the audit in Antrim County was previously planned. The Washington Examiner reached out to Benson’s office for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
The missive about an Antrim County audit comes a day after Michigan Department of State spokesman Jake Rollow warned of a “group” that seeks to spread disinformation regarding the integrity of the Dominion voting equipment in the county. The county first entered the national spotlight when votes were switched as a result of human error, specifically a failure to update software. The error temporarily resulted in 6,000 votes being wrongly tabulated for President-elect Joe Biden rather than President Trump.
More recently, there has been legal action related to Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, with a judge granting a forensic analysis of the machines on Sunday. Despite the flashy headlines after the vote-switching snafu, the analysis came as a result of a man named William Bailey challenging a local marijuana retailer proposal that passed by a razor-thin margin after a retabulation that didn’t factor in three damaged ballots.
A number of people were on hand for the Sunday forensic analysis of the 22 voting machines, including the “group” that seeks to spread disinformation, Rollow said.
“It is disappointing, though not surprising, that the primary goal of this group is to continue spreading false information designed to erode the public’s confidence in the election. By doing so, they injure our democracy and dishonor the 5.5 million Michigan citizens who cast ballots,” the spokesman said. In an email sent to Bailey’s lawyers on Tuesday, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office said Benson was considering “intervening” in the case as a “party defendant.”
Bernard Kerik, an associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, reacted to the news that Benson’s office was preparing to intervene in Bailey’s legal case on Wednesday. Kerik briefly served as the New York Police Department’s commissioner after an appointment by Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. Kerik was convicted in 2010 of several felonies related to tax fraud and making false statements to government officials but was granted a full pardon by Trump earlier this year.
“Why has Michigan Secretary of State @JocelynBenson intervened in the Antrim MI lawsuit in an to prevent the public from exposing voter and election fraud. What is she hiding?” Kerik said over Twitter.
Trump has refused to concede the election to Biden, who is set to take office in less than two months. The president has tethered his hopes to a series of lawsuits in several states that have largely fallen flat and failed to gain any traction in court. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Republican-led attempt to overturn the election results in Pennsylvania, the highest-level rejection since the election. Trump’s legal team has also tried, but, so far, not succeeded, in getting legislatures in battleground states that went for Biden to select electors who will support the president.
On Monday night, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit directly to the Supreme Court. It lists the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the states of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin as defendants and is asking the Supreme Court to rule that the states can send electors to vote for Trump despite the election’s results. Attorneys general in other states are supporting the legal effort.
Biden is expected to receive 306 Electoral College votes compared to 232 for Trump, who was beat out in the popular vote by more than 7 million votes.
