The Michigan Department of State accused the team that conducted an audit of Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Antrim County of participating in a “cover-up.”
In a statement released shortly after President Trump cited the report in claiming that there was a “68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines,” a department spokesman said: “Their cover-up is a tactic of misinformation campaigns that seek to hide the truth.”
The spokesman, Jake Rollow, also noted that the authors didn’t “explicitly” share “the data and methods by which they arrived at their conclusions — a standard used by all actual experts in election administration technology — they must be assumed to be completely false,” and he said the state has “numerous protections in place that would have caught anything like what is claimed falsely in this partisan report.”
The report produced by cyberfirm Allied Security Operations Group said the Dominion equipment examination revealed an error rate of 68.05%, which the assessment said is significantly higher than the “allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines,” which is 0.0008%.
The report was produced in connection to an Antrim County lawsuit challenging a local marijuana retailer proposal. The proposal was passed by a slim margin following a retabulation that didn’t factor in three damaged ballots. Matthew DePerno, the attorney representing the Antrim County resident behind the lawsuit, asked a judge to lift the protective order preventing the release of the report’s findings, which state officials said they agreed to in an effort to “demonstrate the ‘report’ is actually another in a long stream of misguided, vague, and dubious assertions designed to erode public confidence in the November presidential election.”
Although the litigation is hyperlocal on its face, Trump’s legal team and its allies have drawn attention to the forensic audit as they accuse Dominion of being involved in flipping ballots to President-elect Joe Biden. Antrim County was subject to an onslaught of national headlines weeks ago after votes in the presidential contest were found to be counted incorrectly in unofficial results, a snafu that officials have blamed on human error.
The report, signed by Russell James Ramsland Jr., who is part of Allied Security Operations Group’s management team, said the “results of the Antrim County 2020 election are not certifiable” and that “this is a result of machine and/or software error, not human error.”
Dominion, which began as a Canadian company that was later incorporated in the United States, issued a statement saying that it has “been the target of a continuing malicious and widespread disinformation campaign aimed at eroding confidence in the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.”
Members of Trump’s administration, including outgoing Attorney General William Barr and people in the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, have said they have not seen evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud in a scope large enough to change the election’s outcome.
The Electoral College voted on Monday to affirm Biden’s victory. Certified state vote tallies gave 306 votes to Biden and 232 to Trump. A joint session of Congress will vote on the certification of the results on Jan. 6, the last step before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. Trump refuses to concede the election. The president and his allies have pursued dozens of legal challenges to stop Biden from becoming the next president, which have largely been unsuccessful.
