A top Michigan official is drawing federal attention to a “forensic audit” report claiming there were problems with the voting machines used in Antrim County during the 2020 election.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, recently wrote a letter to the House committee investigating the Capitol riot raising the prospect that a controversial analysis of Dominion Voting Systems machines — disputed by the company itself, state officials, and at least one election security expert — was instrumental to former President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread fraud and challenges to the results of the contest.
“What remains unclear is the extent to which the authors of the false report drafted it to lay the groundwork for the former president’s executive order, and if they did so at his direction or the direction of his campaign,” Benson wrote in the letter dated Jan. 26. Attorney General Merrick Garland is copied on the letter.
Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter told the Washington Post in a report published Feb. 9 that he declined a request by Rudy Giuliani and other legal advisers to Trump to seize and share his county’s voting machines. “I said, ‘I can’t just say [to] give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause,” Rossiter said. Giuliani’s attorney said his client declined to comment on the report.
Documents already obtained by the Jan. 6 committee made references to the Antrim County report findings, including an unsigned draft of a presidential order that would have ordered the defense secretary to seize voting machines and appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2020 election. A “strategic communications plan” outlines a Trump team bid to convince House and Senate Republicans to vote against certifying the results of the 2020 election in several states, including Michigan, in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 Electoral College certification.
The report on voting machines was put together during a now-dismissed lawsuit in Antrim County that began as a challenge against a local marijuana retailer proposal that passed by a slim margin following a re-tabulation not factoring in three damaged ballots. However, it was the presidential race that became the focus after initial results in the county showed then-candidate Joe Biden prevailing, although officials discovered tabulation errors and certified Trump as the winner. Officials blamed the incident on human error, in particular a failure to update software that resulted in 6,000 votes erroneously being tabulated for Biden rather than Trump.
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In an early victory, the judge allowed attorney Matthew DePerno and his client, Antrim County resident William Bailey, to pick Allied Security Operations Group, a Dallas-based cybersecurity firm, to perform a “forensic audit” of the Dominion machines in the county on Dec. 6, 2020.
The ensuing 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.” ASOG also concluded that Dominion machines were “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
“At the time we were aware that then-unknown individuals had flown to Antrim to generate the report, and that Trump Campaign attorney [Jenna] Ellis told media that these were members of her team,” Benson wrote in her letter.
At the time, the voting machine examination prompted Benson to warn voters to be wary of a “misinformation campaign” by “individuals with no apparent technical expertise in election technology.” Dominion CEO John Poulos blasted the ASOG report in a hearing with Michigan lawmakers, testifying that the findings were “categorically false” and released by a “biased group.” His company has filed multiple defamation lawsuits since the November election in 2020.
J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, wrote a report released by the Michigan Department of State arguing that human error led to early tabulation errors in Antrim County. Although Halderman acknowledged vulnerabilities in the election technology, he stressed that “there is no evidence that any of these problems was ever exploited in Antrim County.” Halderman has also written another report, which is currently under seal in an election case, on alleged vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting equipment, also of the Dominion variety.
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In her letter, Benson notes that Sidney Powell, an attorney who was assisting Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 election results, may have had access to the ASOG report before 13th Circuit Court Judge Kevin Elsenheimer issued an order to have it released Dec. 14, 2020, because in an election-related filing to the Supreme Court the day before, she cited the “new evidence and information” from the analysis to argue the existence of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election.
DePerno became the face of the battle against officials over election results in Antrim County, a jurisdiction in northern Michigan. He and others, including Trump, alleged that the county voting machines were hacked, changing the votes. DePerno appealed the dismissal of the Antrim County case, but the Michigan Court of Appeals has not yet weighed in, the Traverse County Record-Eagle reported over the weekend. DePerno is now a candidate for Michigan attorney general, and he has been endorsed by Trump.
The current attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced in July 2021 that her office, with the assistance of state police, would investigate individuals who may have personally profited off election fraud claims in Michigan.
This was following the release of a Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee report that found the battleground state’s certified election results were accurate and devoted significant space to allegations of fraud in Antrim County, mentioning DePerno by name and calling his arguments “demonstrably false and based on misleading information and illogical conclusions.” The committee suggested that the attorney general investigate “those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”
Nessel, a Democrat, announced last month that evidence from an investigation into 16 Republicans who signed alternate electoral certificates in favor of Trump in the 2020 election had been given to federal prosecutors.
