A judge blocked subpoenas served to four Michigan clerks in an election fraud lawsuit involving Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Antrim County.
The subpoenas sent to various other counties, which sought documents and access to tabulators and other election equipment, amounted to a “fishing expedition,” Antrim County Circuit Judge Kevin Elsenheimer said during a hearing on Monday.
“The plaintiff must have more than mere conjecture, more than speculation, to support its request to discover information from these other counties,” the judge said, according to the Traverse City Record-Eagle. Elsenheimer further stated that the demands would be “unnecessarily burdensome to the clerks” in those counties.
The subpoenas were issued in March to eight Michigan counties by Matthew DePerno, the attorney representing Central Lake Township resident William Bailey, who 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.
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 voting machines, as former President Donald Trump’s legal allies have alleged. 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.
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DePerno alleged Michigan was one of a quartet of “battleground” states where an “algorithm” was “used to regulate and shift votes in the 2020 elections.” He said in court filings that the data from the eight counties he subpoenaed would be a “control group” that would reveal fraud in Antrim County.
The four counties — Barry, Grand Traverse, Livingston, and Macomb — filed motions in the 13th Circuit Court last month to block the subpoenas, calling them a “fishing expedition” that was “designed to harass” public election officials, according to MLive.com. The other four counties filed similar motions in other jurisdictions.
The plaintiff picked Allied Security Operations Group, a Dallas-based cybersecurity firm, to perform what it called a “forensic audit” of the Dominion machines on Dec. 6. In a widely panned report, ASOG concluded that Dominion machines were “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was allowed to intervene in the case against the county with the help of the state’s attorney general. Michigan Department of State spokesman Jake Rollow warned in a statement obtained by the Washington Examiner around the time of the audit that ASOG’s primary goal “is to continue spreading false information designed to erode the public’s confidence” in the 2020 election. “By doing so, they injure our democracy and dishonor the 5.5 million Michigan citizens who cast ballots,” he added.
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Dominion CEO John Poulos blasted the report in a hearing with Michigan lawmakers. Poulos testified under oath that the report was “categorically false” and was released by a “biased group.” Dominion has filed multiple defamation lawsuits since the November election, citing claims about its technology caused “irreparable damage” to the company’s name and reputation, including a $1.3 billion suit against former Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, a similar suit against lawyer Sidney Powell, and a $1 billion suit against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. At the end of March, an attorney for Dominion declined to rule out that Trump could be sued next.
Also during the hearing on Monday, the judge further narrowed the scope and lengthened the time frame of discovery in the case. The judge has yet to rule on a motion filed by Erik Grill, an attorney representing Benson, and supported by the county that would in effect vacate the case, the Traverse City Record-Eagle reported.
