The Michigan Republican Party said on Friday that a software glitch led 6,000 Republican votes to be counted for Democrats in Antrim County, incorrectly flipping a typically red county blue and spurring demands by Republicans for other counties to check their tallies.
The same software was used to tabulate votes in dozens of Michigan counties, said Laura Cox, chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party.
“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 said in a Friday news conference. “We have now discovered that 47 counties used this same software in the same capacity.”
Cox called on all counties that used the software “to closely examine their result for similar discrepancies.”
A revised count as of 3 p.m. puts President Trump ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by 2,494 votes in the county, leading the former vice president, 56% to 42%.
In 2016, the county of roughly 23,000 residents voted for Trump by an overwhelming majority, with 62% compared to 33% for Hillary Clinton.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, said the results were skewed after the cards were moved from precincts to county offices and uploaded to a computer. Dominion Voting Systems manufactures the software.
The Michigan Department of State laid the blame on human error because the update had not been performed.
“The erroneous reporting of unofficial results from Antrim County was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County Clerk,” the office said in a statement. “The equipment and software did not malfunction and all ballots were properly tabulated. However, the clerk accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results.”
At the conference, GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in Wayne County, a Democratic stronghold, poll watchers were kept in the dark with blocked windows and padlocked doors.
McDaniel said that at Detroit’s TCF Center, a sports arena where ballots are being counted, a whistleblower claimed a supervisor requested that people add a date to ballots, violating election law.
Trump campaign and Republican Party officials are waging a slew of legal battles across the country over vote counts, with loyalist David Bossie tapped to lead the effort.
