State officials dispute conclusion from newly-released audit of Antrim County voting results

LANSING, Mich. - State officials are disputing a new report analyzing the results from Antrim County in Michigan, which argues the results should not have been certified due to equipment "purposefully designed with inherent errors."

The forensic audit of equipment used in the 2020 election in the northern Michigan county was public after a judge approved its release Monday morning. 

But the findings from the report are "inaccurate, incomplete and misleading," an assistant attorney general argued in a virtual hearing after withdrawing objections about the analysis's release.

(Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

"There's no reason to hide," said Erik Grill, who represented the Michigan Secretary of State in the case.

A "forensic imaging" of Dominion Voting System equipment used in some Michigan precincts was ordered by a 13th Circuit Court judge after a lawsuit was filed against Antrim County over concerns of election irregularities from the 2020 election.

The analysis concluded that the equipment "intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors" which "leads to voter or election fraud."

Controversy over the county's results stemmed from a failure to update the equipment's software that led to a glitch that initially showed Joe Biden beating Donald Trump by 3,000 votes - an unusual result for a largely-Republican county where local GOP officials rarely face competition from other candidates.

Despite officials from both parties agreeing on the cause of the error, misinformation about the voter equipment reporting inaccurate results during the presidential election has run rampant since Nov. 3.

RELATED: Trump lawyers wrongly cite election "red flags" in Michigan that actually happened in Minnesota

Some of the allegations have made their way into lawsuits backed by the president, who has repeatedly tried to overturn several states' results following his projections showing Biden winning. In Michigan, Biden won by more than 154,000 votes.

Russell Ramsland, the cybersecurity expert who is part of a security company that ran the forensic audit on Dec. 6, has previously provided sworn affidavits arguing election equipment like Dominion Voting Systems led to massive voter irregularities. 

In one particular case, a report he signed off on mistook precinct data from Minnesota for that of Michigan, a fact check later found.

In the latest case, Ramsland disagreed with the conclusion drawn by state officials concerning the human error made in Antrim County, instead, arguing a "machine error built into the voting software" caused a "vote flip."