On Saturday, MLive.com reported that a lawyer who represented former President Donald Trump in a 2016 election lawsuit is speaking out against a conspiracy theory advanced by the Michigan GOP to justify yet another "audit" of the votes.
"There is no legal mechanism to reverse President Joe Biden's victory. John Pirich, a retired attorney who represented Trump in a 2016 election lawsuit, said there's zero chance Trump will be reinstated. Michigan's certified results show Biden won the state by 154,000 votes, a difference of 3 percentage points," reported Malachi Barrett. "'It's just spinning a fairy tale out of an event that is over with and done with,' Pirich said."
The theory surrounds Antrim County, a Republican stronghold in northern Michigan which initially posted erroneous results showing Biden ahead. The error was corrected — but some Republicans baselessly believe it was actually the work of an "international conspiracy" that also changed the ballot counts elsewhere in Michigan to give Biden the state.
"A detailed analysis by J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor and co-chair of Michigan's Election Security Advisory Commission, found votes were miscounted due to the mishandling of last-minute ballot design changes," said the report. "Trump and his allies seized on the mistakes, arguing it showed votes were purposefully miscounted. A hand recount, official statewide audits and Halderman's 54-page analysis explained the mistakes and reaffirmed the results, but Antrim County is still tied to stolen election theories."
Antrim also happens to use voting machines from Dominion, an elections equipment company at the heart of a number of far-right conspiracy theories. Dominion is currently suing multiple figures in Trump's orbit, including "kraken" lawyer Sidney Powell and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, both of whom have suggested Dominion illegally "flipped" votes from Trump to Biden.
The GOP is demanding yet another ballot "audit" of Michigan on top of previous ones that found no irregularities, but that is unlikely to move forward, noted the report: "Commissioners in Antrim and Cheboygan counties — which both overwhelmingly voted for Trump — have debated the merits of ordering additional audits. The Michigan Bureau of Elections sent letters to both counties saying they can't order 'forensic audits' of voting machines. Last month, the Antrim County Board of Commissioners voted 5-4 against conducting a 'full complete forensic audit' of the 2020 election."
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