The state of Michigan is preparing to intervene in a lawsuit alleging fraud in Antrim County as the small GOP stronghold in northern Michigan is emerging as a last hope for allies of President Donald Trump seeking to cast doubts on the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential election.
As chief election officer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is concerned about allegations in the lawsuit that the county’s election results were “somehow influenced by fraud or the purported rigging of the … tabulators,” Assistant Attorney General Heather Meingast said in a Tuesday email to an attorney pursuing the lawsuit. Benson “is considering intervening in this case as a party defendant.”
Well-publicized errors in the unofficial election results Antrim County sent to the state of Michigan on election night made it appear that Democrat Joe Biden received more votes than Trump, when in fact Trump had won the county by nearly 4,000 votes.
The errors were corrected and Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, took responsibility, According to a court filing, Guy made an error Oct. 23 when she updated ballot information to include a Mancelona Township candidate who had been inadvertently omitted from the ballot.
Instead of updating the ballot information for all precincts, Guy only updated the ballot information in Mancelona Township. The resulting mismatch in the ballot information for various county precincts caused some results to be transposed when the unofficial results were posted, but the results for each precinct, preserved both in the form of paper ballots and print-outs from each tabulator, were accurate, the county said in a Dec. 1 court filing.