By Randy DeSoto, WESTERN JOURNAL
Published November 6, 2020 at 4:06pm
David Goldman / APElection worker Mary Pluszczynsky brings out trays of ballots while setting up for election inspectors to count votes Tuesday at City Hall in Warren, Michigan. (David Goldman / AP)
A Michigan county has flipped from a win for Democrat Joe Biden to one for President Donald Trump after the discovery of a software glitch and a manual recount.
“Officials with Antrim County posted updated results showing President Trump won the county with 9,783 votes making up 56.46% of ballots cast. Joe Biden earned 7,289 votes or 42.07%,” WLNS-TV reported. (So the vote went from Biden 3,000 to Trump 2,494. A change of 5,494.)
Results in Antrim County published on Wednesday morning showed Biden winning by slightly more than 3,000 votes, with 98 percent of precincts reporting, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Trump carried the northwestern Michigan county over Hillary Clinton by approximately 4,000 votes in 2016.
Antrim County officials blamed the election software system, explaining that totals counted did not match tabulator tapes.
The “Dominion Voting System” used in the county is also used in 64 others across the Wolverine State, WLNS-TV reported.
However, a spokesperson for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told the outlet “the skewed results were the result of a ‘county user error’ not a software issue and there is no reason to believe similar errors with ballot counts happened anywhere else.”
Tom McMillin, a former state lawmaker from Oakland County and member of the state board of education, told the Detroit Free Press he noticed irregularities with the Antrim County vote tallies late Tuesday when he was reviewing the returns for board of education candidates.
“It just looked weird,” he said, noting Biden and other Democrats had far more votes than normal. “Two-thirds of the townships looked really messed up.”
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In addition to Antrim County, a computer error in Oakland County near Detroit caused incumbent GOP County Commissioner Adam Kochenderfer to think he had lost his re-election bid, WXYZ-TV reported.
“I received a call from the Oakland County Elections Division telling me that there had been a technical glitch in several precincts,” Kochenderfer said in a Thursday Facebook post. “Instead of losing by 104 votes, I won by 1,127.”
“While I’m grateful for the outcome, we should conduct a thorough review of our system to prevent this from happening again,” he added.
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