As lawsuits to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s historical presidential victory get shot down one by one like ducks in a shooting gallery, Republicans in Michigan are determined to keep their supporters riled up into a frothy lather by convincing them, without evidence or honesty, that the Biden-Harris win along with Sen. Gary Peters’ victory were actually stolen from them. They’re currently in court with five more lawsuits, one of which would disenfranchise over one million voters.
These lawsuits have two goals. The first, of course, is to make people not trust our election system in Michigan. When people don’t trust the system, they’re much more susceptible to be scammed by voter suppression efforts the GOP is so notorious for.
But the big reason appears to be the Big Grift. They want to wring as much money out of their supporters’ bank accounts as they can now that the election is over.
Yesterday, I got this fundraising email from the Michigan Republican Party which claims they have “already uncovered that 6,000 votes in one Michigan county were WRONGLY attributed to Democrats”:
I did some digging to find out where this astonishing claim came from. It turns out that it’s from Antrim County where voting machine updates caused a temporary glitch that caused vote totals to be improperly reported. The mistake came from human error and was quickly rectified by local election officials. You can read a detailed report about what happened HERE. Here’s an excerpt:
After Antrim County initially programmed its election software for the November Election, the county identified in October two local races where the ballot content had to be updated. The county received updated programming from its election programming vendor, Election Source. The updated programming correctly updated the election software for the county.
When the software was reprogrammed, the County also had to update the software on all of the media drives that are placed in tabulators to ensure tabulators communicate properly with the election management system. The county did update the media drives that went into the tabulators with the corrected local races, but did not update the media drives on the tabulators for the rest of the county. Because the Clerk correctly updated the media drives for the tabulators with changes to races, and because the other tabulators did not have changes to races, all tabulators counted ballots correctly.
However, because the county did not update the media drives for the tabulators that did not have changes to races, those tabulators did not communicate properly with the County’s central election management system software when the county combined and reported unofficial results. Every tabulator recorded ballots correctly but the unofficial reports were erroneous.
The election management system and voting machines Antrim County uses are provided by Dominion Voting Systems. Republicans across the country, including lame-duck president Donald Trump are desperately trying to convince anyone who will listen tha Dominion Voting Systems intentionally attempted to throw the election to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (as well as Gary Peters and other Democrats on the ballot.) As you might expect, it’s complete nonsense and is, in fact disinformation to accomplish that first goal of making people distrust our election system:
President Trump on Thursday spread new baseless claims about Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software that local governments around the nation use to help run their elections, fueling a conspiracy theory that Dominion “software glitches” changed vote tallies in Michigan and Georgia last week.
The Dominion software was used in only two of the five counties that had problems in Michigan and Georgia, and in every instance there was a detailed explanation for what had happened. In all of the cases, software did not affect the vote counts.
In the two Michigan counties that had mistakes, the inaccuracies were because of human errors, not software problems, according to the Michigan Department of State, county officials and election-security experts. Only one of the two Michigan counties used Dominion software.
Issues in three Georgia counties had other explanations. In one county, an apparent problem with Dominion software delayed officials’ reporting of the vote tallies, but did not affect the actual vote count. In two other counties, a separate company’s software slowed poll workers’ ability to check-in voters.
What Republicans want you to believe, beyond all rationality, is that a software company intentionally sabotaged an election in a tiny, majority-Republican county with a Republican County Clerk and that nobody would notice. The more laughable part is that the 6,000 votes in question wouldn’t have even dented Biden’s and Peters’ crushing victories over Trump and two-time loser/future Fox News host John James. But what most of us believe isn’t really important to achieving their primary goal of getting their supporters to send them more and more of their money: The Big Grift.
If it wasn’t so dangerous to our democracy, it would almost be funny.
