A top Michigan senator said investigators still believe human error is to blame for issues in the Antrim County vote that has captured the attention of President Trump’s legal team.
But state Sen. Ed McBroom, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, which recently held a hearing in which the CEO of Dominion Voting Systems rejected voting fraud allegations, said there are questions left to be answered.
“The committee’s work on voting software is not complete as we have several additional and clarifying questions for Dominion from our first hearing and are currently working to schedule a hearing with ESS and Hart,” he said in a statement on Tuesday before the Christmas holiday, referring to other electronic voting system companies.
McBroom, who hails from Waucedah Township, said his panel has spent “many hours investigating allegations and events” surrounding the election and acknowledged the “significant amount of concern in our state and nationwide” about Dominion software being used during the contest.
“The simple answer given by the clerk of Antrim County still stands: human error is the factor that contributed to the unofficial vote count errors,” he added. “These errors were quickly discovered and rectified by the protective systems our state has built in to verify and protect election integrity and were further verified when a hand count was completed.”
Trump’s legal team, led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, drew attention to Antrim County when it was reported that thousands of votes were erroneously tabulated, temporarily, for President-elect Joe Biden instead of Trump. Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, claimed responsibility for the snafu, blamed on a failure to upload a software update to all the county’s Dominion tabulators.
Still, scrutiny of the small northern Michigan county has been drawn out thanks to a legal challenge against a local marijuana retailer proposal that passed by a slim margin following a retabulation not factoring in three damaged ballots. A judge allowed what was described as a “forensic audit” of Dominion equipment by the plaintiff, after which a report was released that was disparaged by Michigan state and Dominion officials as being misleading and designed to discredit Biden’s victory.
The ASOG report said the Dominion equipment examination revealed an error rate of 68.05%, which the assessment said is far above the “allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines” at 0.0008% and “demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.”
John Poulos, the CEO of Dominion, voluntarily testified under oath before the Michigan Senate’s Oversight Committee on Dec. 15. He condemned the characterization of his company’s machines by Russell Ramsland Jr., the co-founder of the Allied Security Operations Group, who made headlines in recent weeks because of an affidavit claiming widespread voter fraud in Michigan that was found to have cited precincts in Minnesota.
During the hearing, Poulos said the election fraud claims made about Dominion are “complete lies.” He also testified that ASOG is a “biased, nonindependent organization” and that the report was “categorically false and technically incomprehensible.” Poulos told CNN on Thursday that a flurry of defamation lawsuits are imminent a day after the company’s legal team sent notices to Giuliani and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, instructing them to preserve all records.
McBroom said Poulos “dispelled all manner of rumors about the origins, connections, and dealings of Dominion Voting Systems,” but as his statement made clear, questions remain as the state Senate investigation continues.
An audit conducted last week affirmed Trump’s victory in Antrim County, with the president getting a net gain of 12 votes out of 15,962 cast. “Dominion’s voting machines accurately tabulated votes cast for President. Now it’s time for the disinformation campaigns to end, and for all leaders to unequivocally affirm the Nov election was secure, accurate & fair,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson wrote in a tweet.
Trump’s minimal gains had no bearing on the state of the race, as Biden won Michigan and its 16 Electoral College votes by roughly 150,000 ballots, but Trump and his allies have pointed to examinations of Dominion machinery as a potential wild card. This includes in Maricopa County, Arizona, where GOP lawmakers are waging a legal battle to gain access to voting machines and records.
Earlier this week, Trump huddled at the White House with conservative lawmakers who are planning a long-shot bid to object when the House and Senate meet on Jan. 6 to certify the Electoral College results.
In a video posted to his YouTube page on Wednesday afternoon, Giuliani claimed that legislatures in several battleground states that went for Biden will be reviewing their decisions to certify the election results “based on newly discovered evidence” during the period after Christmas. “Starting after Christmas, this is really going to blow up,” he pledged.
