Antrim County hand tally affirms certified election results
An audit conducted Thursday of the votes cast in the November presidential election in Antrim County, the heart of a conspiracy theory about Dominion Voting Systems, affirmed the outcome with a net gain of 12 votes for Republican President Donald Trump, out of 15,962 votes cast, officials said.
The hand tally of every vote cast for president in Antrim County in the November general election could put the conspiracies to rest after state and local election officials have spent more than a month explaining that the incorrect unofficial results reported by the county on election night stemmed from human error.
Guy, who is a Republican, said that after learning some candidates in local races were omitted from the ballot, she needed to update the ballot information stored on media drives attached to the tabulating machines. But she mistakenly made the changes only in some precincts, instead of all of them, leading to mismatched data when the unofficial countywide tallies were being compiled, and an inaccurate report of the unofficial results, Guy and Benson have said. The tabulators accurately read voters' ballots, they said.
A report concerning Antrim's tabulators, written by a former Texas Republican congressional candidate and manager at the Dallas-based Allied Security Operations Group, attempted to show otherwise.
Ryan Macias, the former head of voting system testing and certification at the Election Assistance Commission, said, "The majority of the findings are false and misleading due to the fact that the entities reviewing the system lack knowledge and expertise in election technology." The EAC certified the voting system used in Antrim County in September 2018. EAC certification, which is voluntary, establishes certain error thresholds for the computer code that runs the systems.
Macias said Ramsland mistook the tabulator's settings to detect ordinary problems with ballots, such as a voter incorrectly marking the ballot or voting for more than the allowed number of candidates, with errors with the tabulator.
"Calling these an error would be synonymous with stating that you reviewed a car's logs and for each instance the gas light turned on we will call it an error," Macias said.
