Mich. completes post-election audits
Benson: Comprehensive inquiries confirm results
Almost four months after the November presidential election, Michigan has completed its most comprehensive series of post-election audits in the state’s history, confirming the results, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced Tuesday.
The audits examined the ballots cast in the general election, the machines that tabulated those ballots and the election procedures used.
“It is time for leaders across the political spectrum to tell their constituents the truth, that our election was the most secure in history, and the results accurately reflect the will of Michigan’s voters,” Benson said.
Former President Donald Trump and his allies spent months spreading misinformation about Michigan’s election process and outcome. Polls consistently show a majority of Republican voters don’t trust the outcome of the presidential election.
President Joe Biden won Michigan by over 154,000 votes. But soon after Michigan’s clerks completed counting a record number of ballots in the middle of a global pandemic, “their work was immediately attacked by the lies, meritless conspiracy theories and uninformed observations of the former president and his supporters,” Benson said.
She said she hopes the completion of the audits can convince those who doubted the outcome of the legitimacy of the election results, and she commended the hard work of the state Bureau of Elections and more than 1,300 clerks for conducting over 250 audits across the state.
In mid-December, Democratic and Republican clerks conducted a “zero-margin risk-limiting audit” which entailed a hand recount of the ballots cast in the presidential election in Antrim County. The conservative county was at the heart of a conspiracy theory that falsely asserted that the county’s Dominion Voting Systems tabulators switched votes for Trump to Biden — Trump won Antrim in the final tally.
The audit affirmed the county’s certified election results, and confirmed that an earlier counting error in the unofficial results showing Biden winning were the result of human error and had nothing to do with the tabulating machines.
Michigan election officials also undertook a statewide “risk-limiting audit” of the presidential election in which more than 18,000 randomly selected ballots from more than 1,300 jurisdictions were reviewed by clerks to confirm the accuracy of the results of the presidential election. The total number of ballots collected fell 78 ballots short of what was needed for a complete sample, which Benson attributed to timing issues as well as the newness of the audit.
State lawmakers from both parties say election reform is a top priority this year. Benson has issued her own set of sweeping election reform proposals to lawmakers, including giving clerks more time to process absentee ballots before Election Day.
Instead of heeding clerks’ pleas and the advice of national experts, the Legislature approved a one-time exception to allow clerks in some jurisdictions to begin processing ballots the day before the Nov. 3 election. This amount of time was insufficient to process the huge numbers of absentee ballots submitted because many voters opted not to cast their ballot in person because of the pandemic. The sheer numbers of absentees and the extra time it took to count them, provided an opportunity for misinformation about the election process and outcome to spread, Benson said.
Benson said she hopes lawmakers will consider changing the law to give clerks more time to canvass the ballots before election results are certified. This could have helped reconcile imbalances between the number of ballots cast and the ballot counts found in some jurisdictions.
An audit of the counting boards that counted absentee ballots cast by Detroit’s voters found that 83% of the counting boards were balanced, up from 27% in the county canvass, Benson said. The net number of ballots that were out of balance was 17, she said. More than 174,000 absentee ballots were cast by the city’s voters.
Based on this finding, Benson called on lawmakers to amend the state’s election law to make precincts and counting boards found to be out of balance without an explanation eligible for a recount. “Michigan is one of the only states in the country with such a strict regulation,” she said.
Among her election reform proposals, Benson also has recommended requiring a statewide risk-limiting audit of the election results before they are certified. Lawsuits filed by Trump allies requesting audits preceding certification were rejected in court.
The conclusion of the audits should eradicate “any rationale for continuing to question the integrity of the election and the validity of the outcome,” Benson said. “Now it’s up to every leader to acknowledge that truth.”
And as Michigan’s lawmakers consider making changes to the state’s election process, Benson called on leaders “not to build policies off of lies,” as state lawmakers across the country have pushed changes to election laws that restrict voting access in response to baseless claims of a stolen election.
Clara Hendrickson fact-checks Michigan issues and politics as a corps member with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Make a tax-deductible contribution to support her work at bit.ly/ freepRFA. Contact her at chendrickson@freepress.com or 313-296-5743 for comments or to suggest a fact-check. Follow her on Twitter @clarajanehen .
WASHINGTON – A “historic” agreement between competing pharmaceutical companies will allow the United States to have enough vaccines for every adult by the end of May, President Joe Biden announced Tuesday.
Merck will help Johnson & Johnson make its newly approved vaccine to meet that goal ahead of a July timeline.
The president also said he’s using the federal government’s pharmacy vaccination program to prioritize getting teachers and child care workers vaccinated by the end of the month.
“Throughout March, they will be able to sign up for an appointment at a pharmacy near them,” Biden said.
And, while only 37 days into his presidency, Biden said the administration is already halfway to his goal of administering 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days.
“We’re making progress from the mess we inherited,” Biden said.
He remained cautious, however, when asked when the nation will get to back normal, declining to set a time frame “because we don’t know for sure.”
Biden also stressed the importance of people continuing to wear masks, in remarks made not long after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he’s lifting that state’s mask mandate.
At the daily briefing before the president spoke, White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the vaccine venture a “historic manufacturing partnership” between two competitors.
“As soon as we learned about the fact that Johnson & Johnson was behind in manufacturing ... we took steps to ensure we could expedite that and partner them with one of the world’s biggest manufacturers,” Psaki said.
Also on Tuesday, vaccination centers were to start receiving some of the 3.9 million doses of J&J vaccines, which received emergency use authorization on Saturday. That’s the entirety of its current inventory.