A court case in Antrim County, Michigan over a local marijuana ballot initiative threatens to fan the flames of voter distrust concerning the integrity of the 2020 election for president. A computer security firm hired by the plaintiff in the local lawsuit performed a forensic audit of the Dominion Voting Systems hardware and software. The results were highly critical, suggesting that Dominion’s system is intentionally designed to create “bulk errors” that then have to be “adjudicated” by election officials, opening the door for the mass changing of votes.

The judge in the case ruled on Monday to allow the release of the report, the same day that the Electoral College meets to cast votes for president and vice president.

Antrim County became well known during the election for first reporting an early lead for Vice President Joe Biden with about 12,000 votes cast, in a county that had gone heavily for President Donald Trump in 2016. County election officials claimed to have found and corrected the vote totals, and announced that “human error” had resulted in an unintentional switch of several thousand votes to Biden from President Donald Trump when an election employee failed to “update” the system software. When the final results came in several days later, Trump comfortably led Biden by approximately 4,000 votes out of 17,000 cast.

Trump narrowly won Michigan in 2016 by less than 11,000 votes.

But it was the issue of retail marijuana that led to the court case in which local voter William Bailey challenged the narrowly passed ballot initiative. On Monday, the court allowed the public release of the forensic computer analysis, and its conclusions are potentially explosive for the presidential contest, considering that Dominion voting machines are not only used in 49 counties across Michigan, but in 28 states across the country.

Keep in mind that the audit was performed only on machines in Antrim County, and not elsewhere. And it does not allege fraud was committed, only that the design of the system made it easy to do so, and that key elements of an audit trail have disappeared. Here are some of the key findings from the audit report:

“We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. 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.

“The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.

“The Dominion Voting System produced systemic errors and high error rates both prior to the update and after the update; meaning the update (or lack of update) is not the cause of errors.

“A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency or audit trail.

“Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of records prevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed.”

The report also indicated that security logs are missing, and that someone attempted, unlawfully, to “zero out” all the election data on the machines in late November.

The state government of Michigan says the report isn’t accurate. Erik Grill, an assistant attorney general told the judge on Monday that the report was “inaccurate, incomplete, and misleading.” Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater says the report’s conclusions can be explained by “routine election procedures or error corrections,” while Dominion Voting Systems issued a statement saying that the report is part of a “continuing malicious and widespread disinformation campaign” designed to undermine the public’s confidence in the 2020 election.

The issues surrounding Dominion Voting Systems and its software will not be going away anytime soon, it appears, no matter what the Electoral College does and what Congress decides to do on January 6 when it meets to consider the results of that vote.

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