Report spreads false claims about Dominion machines in Michigan

CLAIM » A report released this week in Michigan shows Dominion Voting Systems machines in Antrim County, Michigan, were “intentionally designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

THE FACTS » There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. There’s also no evidence the election technology firm Dominion Voting Systems switched or deleted votes, used algorithms to unevenly weigh vote tallies, colluded with Democrats, or used foreign servers — despite repeated efforts by the president and his supporters to claim it did. A deluge of false claims around Dominion is circling back to Antrim County, Michigan, this week after starting there on election night, when confusion around a clerk’s error drove social media users to falsely blame the election management system used to tabulate the data. The renewed attention to Dominion and Antrim County this week stems from a report released on Monday as part of a lawsuit seeking to challenge the county’s election results. The 23-page report — signed by a former Republican congressional candidate with a history of spreading misinformation about Michigan’s election — claims Dominion “is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.” The report claims the results of the election in Antrim County should not be certifiable because a forensic analysis of voting machines found a “machine error built into the voting software designed to create error.” A hand tally of all presidential election votes in Antrim County completed on Thursday matched the results found by voting machines, showing that the machines did not err there. A joint statement released by the Michigan Department of State and the Michigan attorney general’s office strongly disputed the report, saying its analysis is “critically flawed, filled with dramatic conclusions without any evidence to support them.” Antrim County officials concurred in a press release, saying, “An analysis which should have been data and fact based is instead riddled with false and unsupported claims, baseless attacks, and incorrect use of technical terms.” Officials have thoroughly explained the human mistake that caused the small, Republican-leaning county to temporarily report unofficial results that reflected a landslide win for Joe Biden. “It was prompted by the clerk not updating media drives in some of the machines in Antrim County, an accidental human error,” the Michigan Department of State said in a release. County Clerk Sheryl Guy told the

AP, “There was no malice, no fraud here, just human error.” Several social media users, including Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and the president himself, have cited the report’s mention of the county having a “68% error rate,” which it claims is based on a review of tabulation logs from three days after Election Day. The report’s authors didn’t explain all the errors they saw, or what they mean by “error rate.” County officials told the AP they didn’t understand the number, since they have not had a chance to look through the data. The report released Monday also included a slew of other debunked claims about Dominion, which Dominion CEO John Poulos addressed at length on Tuesday in prepared statements to a Republican-led Michigan Senate committee investigating the election. “The disinformation campaign being waged against Dominion defies facts or logic,” Poulos said. “To date, no one has produced credible evidence of vote fraud or vote switching on Dominion systems because these things simply have not occurred.”