Donald Trump
stated on December 15, 2020 in a tweet:
“68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines. Should be, by law, a tiny percentage of one percent.”
In a Dec. 15 tweet, Trump claimed there was a "68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines. Should be, by law, a tiny percentage of one percent."
He suggested Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson would face legal scrutiny for the alleged errors. "Did Michigan Secretary of State break the law? Stay tuned!" Trump wrote.
Trump was reacting to a consultant’s report that a judge made public Monday in connection with an election lawsuit in Antrim County, in northern Michigan, where a misapplied software update initially led to incorrect unofficial results being reported on election night. But Trump’s tweet misinterprets the findings of the report, which itself presents a misleading picture.
Michigan vote tabulators do not read ballots incorrectly 68% of the time. Nor is that statement true if applied only to the Antrim County tabulators in the Nov. 3 election. And the report Trump reacted to, while ambiguous and inaccurate on the subject of errors, does not make that claim.
The report is signed by cybersecurity analyst Russell James Ramsland Jr. of Allied Security Operations Group, a firm whose representatives have provided analyses and affidavits for lawsuits brought by Trump allies, falsely alleging voter fraud and election irregularities.
In one such analysis on voter turnout, Ramsland mistook voting jurisdictions in Minnesota for Michigan towns. In another, filed in support of a federal lawsuit in Michigan, he made inaccurate claims about voter turnout in various municipalities, misstating them as much as tenfold.
The scrutiny of Antrim’s ballots arises from an error in the reporting of unofficial results on election night, which initially showed voters in the heavily GOP county casting more votes for Democrat Joe Biden than for Trump. Trump allies have seized on that error, and other alleged irregularities, in their fruitless quest for evidence of election rigging through equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems.
State and county officials say the reporting error, which was corrected soon after the election, was the result of human error by County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, before the election.
Guy 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 investigation of Antrim’s equipment arose from a different issue in the case. In granting a request for "forensic imaging" of the data and software inside the Dominion tabulators, Judge Kevin Elsenheimer of Michigan’s 13th Circuit Court was responding to concerns about a closely decided proposal to allow a marijuana dispensary in the village of Central Lake. Ramsland’s firm, Allied Security, conducted the investigation.
In his report, Ramsland claimed, "The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%)." On the Antrim machines, he wrote, he "observed an error rate of 68.05%."
The FEC regulates campaign finance, not voting equipment, and has no such guideline. The federal agency that does deal with voting equipment is the Election Assistance Commission. Antrim County’s Dominion tabulators are certified by the EAC. In Michigan, 65 out of the state’s 83 counties use voting systems manufactured by Dominion.