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Judge Allows Release Of Dominion Audit Report; UPDATE: State Officials Respond

   DailyWire.com
President and CEO of Election Systems & Software Tom Burt, President and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems John Poulos, President and CEO of Hart InterCivic Julie Mathis testify during a hearing before the House Administration Committee January 9, 2020 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

A forensic audit report of Dominion voting machines in Michigan’s Antrim County — which received national attention after it was discovered that an “error” “flipped” 6,000 votes for President Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden — was released Monday after a judge allowed the report to be unsealed.

The report, produced by a group working on behalf of Antrim County resident William Bailey, who filed a lawsuit against the county challenging the integrity of the election equipment, claims that the “error” that “flipped” the 6,000 votes was “machine error.” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson previously concluded that the problem was caused by “human error,” a conclusion that state officials reiterated Monday in response to the release of the audit report.

The audit was produced by Allied Security Operations Group, a firm that has worked with lawyers for Trump and his allies on election challenges. The report was under protective order until Monday when 13th Circuit Court Judge Kevin Elsenheimer ordered that the group could release the findings.

Elsenheimer, a former Republican lawmaker, allowed the release after state and county officials withdrew their objections. The Michigan Secretary of State, a Democrat, has dismissed the report as promoting “baseless claims of fraud in an effort to mislead American voters and undermine the integrity of the election.”

“The Antrim County Clerk and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson have stated that the election night error detailed above by the vote ‘flip’ from Trump to Biden, was the result of human error caused by the failure to update the Mancelona Township tabulator prior to election night for a down ballot race,” reads the report by Allied Security Operations Group. “We disagree and conclude that the vote flip occurred because of machine error built into the voting software designed to create error.”

“We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” the audit report charged. “The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud.”

Allied Security Operations Group concludes that the Dominion system “should not be used in Michigan” and the Antrim County results “should not have been certified.”

Last weekend, Judge Eisenheimer ordered Antrim County election officials to preserve all election materials and refrain from operating any of the county’s Dominion Voting Systems machines ahead of a forensic audit by the Trump campaign.

“Antrim County election officials discovered that ‘human error’ flipped 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden after Bailey alerted them to some inconsistencies in the county’s reporting of the vote,” The Daily Wire noted earlier this month. “The Michigan Secretary of State’s office said that ‘the clerk accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results.'”

“The erroneous reporting of unofficial results from Antrim county was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County Clerk,” the state said. “The equipment and software did not malfunction and all ballots were properly tabulated. However, the clerk accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results.”

Assistant Attorney General Erik Grill claims the Allied audit analysis is “inaccurate, incomplete and misleading,” The Detroit Free Press reported Monday. “There’s no reason to hide,” Grill said. “There is nothing to hide.”

Benson withdrew her objection to releasing the report, said Grill, because the attorney representing Bailey had given interviews to the press in which he leveled allegations about the election results and Benson. “Any attempt to suppress the report now would only incorrectly be seen as an attempted coverup, he said,” the Free Press reports.

“Dominion Voting Systems and the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office continue to urge caution about false information related to Antrim County,” The Detroit News notes. Dominion said in a statement released Monday that the error was caused when officials did not update the programming, emphasizing that the error was caught in the post-election canvass process. “The post-election canvass process is designed to catch errors, which is exactly where these errors were discovered,” the company said.

“It is disappointing, though not surprising, that the primary goal of this group is to continue spreading false information designed to erode the public’s confidence in the election,” said Jake Rollow, spokesman for Benson.

In a press release issued after the unsealing of the Allied audit, Benson accused the Trump campaign of “choosing to allow shadowy organizations claiming expertise to throw around baseless claims of fraud in an effort to mislead American voters and undermine the integrity of the election.”

“Authors in the report also make unverified and unsupported claims that ‘fraud,’ ‘intentional errors’ and ‘bad faith’ decisions made by election officials led them to their conclusions in the report,” the Dec. 14 press release reads. “Moreover, many of their assertions are unsupported by evidence, with some even constituting hearsay and clearly show that the authors lack first-hand knowledge of events.”

In a statement to the court signed under oath on Dec. 13, Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s Director of Elections, said the Allied report “makes a series of unsupported conclusions” and “ascribes motives of fraud and obfuscation to processes that are easily explained as routine election procedures or error corrections.” Brater’s statement reads in part:

Although a more detailed analysis of the report must be conducted with an individual with technical expertise, it is apparent to me that the report makes a series of unsupported conclusions, ascribes motives of fraud and obfuscation to processes that are easily explained as routine election procedures or error corrections, and suggests without explanation that elements of election software not used in Michigan are somehow responsible for tabulation or reporting errors that are either nonexistent or easily explained. For this reason, the preliminary analysis appears to include a number of questionable statements that should be fully investigated before these conclusions are released to the public, and even now the preliminary conclusions do not appear accurate or complete.

Trump won Antrim County by about 4,000 votes but lost the state by around 154,000 votes.

Timothy Pearce contributed to this report. 

This article has been expanded to include more information about Grill’s comments, state official’s responses to the audit report, and the state’s election totals.

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