It's Spreading: MI County Votes for Audit Over Doubts About 2020 Election Outcome
Here’s a question: If election audits are unfounded and based on “debunked conspiracy theories,” as so many on the left claim, what’s to be afraid of?
Plenty, if you ask the left.
During a major speech June 11 on the Department of Justice’s role in elections, Attorney General Merrick Garland slammed “abnormal post-election audit methodologies that may put the integrity of the voting process at risk and undermine public confidence in our democracy.”
The targets were clear: the 2020 election audit currently going on in Maricopa County, Arizona, and counties and states that might want to emulate it.
Ironically, nothing “put[s] the integrity of the voting process at risk and undermine[s] public confidence in our democracy” quite like the federal government telling jurisdictions they can’t audit election results.
Well, Garland and the Democrats likely have a new target: Cheboygan County, Michigan, wants to audit its election results to determine how accurate they are.
To make things doubly annoying for the Democrats, Dominion Voting Systems is part of the controversy yet again.
According to a Tuesday report from The Hill, the Cheboygan County Board of Commissioners voted 4-3 to send a letter to the Michigan elections director formally requesting an audit.
In the letter, signed by the board’s chairman, John Wallace, the county said, “As commissioners, we have heard from many of our constituents expressing concerns/questions related to the November 3, 2020 election. We believe we have a responsibility to address these concerns/questions.”
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The letter, dated Tuesday, asked the state for permission to discover whether “the actual vote tally for the presidential election within Cheboygan County was accurately reported to the state election officials.”
“We are mindful of the legal requirement … to obtain your approval, as the representative of the Secretary of State, to conduct an election audit,” it said. “Therefore, please accept this letter as the formal request of the Cheboygan County Board of Commissioners to conduct an audit of the November 3, 2020 election held within Cheboygan County, under the terms and conditions specified in this letter.”
Some of those “terms and conditions” won’t go over well with the MSNBC crowd, particularly since it’s more bad news for Dominion Voting Systems.
The audit would seek to determine “[w]hether the actual vote tally for the presidential election within Cheboygan County was accurately reported by the county’s Dominion vote tabulator and Election System and Software machine. We believe the best evidence of this accuracy is to conduct a hand recount of the Cheboygan County presidential election ballots and to compare the results of that hand recount to the electronic vote results that were reported.”
“The requested probe also seeks whether ‘the county’s Dominion vote tabulator and/or Election System and Software machine was actually in communication with any unauthorized computer and whether there is any evidence that any unauthorized computer actually manipulated the actual presidential election vote tally within Cheboygan County,'” The Hill reported.
The decision on the recount ultimately rests with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. According to The Associated Press, Benson’s spokeswoman said she’d review and respond to the letter, although Benson has previously asserted that more than 250 audits showed the results were “fair, secure and accurate, and that the results reflect the will of Michigan voters.” In other words, holdeth not your breath.
It’s interesting, however, to see the anaphylactic reaction anyone has to these audits.
Cheboygan County went heavily for Donald Trump, with 64 percent voting for the incumbent. Furthermore, Joe Biden carried Michigan by 2.8 percentage points. The results of a Cheboygan County recount wouldn’t change anything. It would either buttress faith in a system Benson claimed is “fair, secure and accurate” or it would reveal flaws in that system.
Both of those are results anyone should welcome — and it’s not just Cheboygan County that’s looking into making sure people have confidence in the system.
The Hill reported on Monday that Pennsylvania state Sen. David Argall, a Republican who heads the committee in charge of overseeing elections, said he supports a Maricopa-style audit.
“It’s a very careful recount, forensic audit, so yeah, I don’t see the danger in it,” Argall said. “I just think that it would not be a bad idea at all to proceed with an audit similar to what they’re doing in Arizona.”
Fine, but here’s the first paragraph of Reid Wilson’s piece for The Hill: “A top Pennsylvania Republican says he supports an audit of the state’s presidential election results similar to a review being conducted in Arizona, raising the potential for other states to spend taxpayer money investigating former President Trump’s false claims of improprieties and fraud.”
First, it’s interesting to see journalists suddenly opposed to using taxpayer dollars for election audits. Now try $2.3 trillion infrastructure bills.
Second, this isn’t about “investigating former President Trump’s false claims of improprieties and fraud,” as Wilson put it. And to be fair, this is just a representative sample of what the media and the Democrats are saying. They fail to realize people have lost trust in the electoral system — and the Reid Wilsons of the world aren’t going to re-establish it with ledes about “false claims” of election fraud.
This is why we need audits. These aren’t unsupervised attempts to overturn election results. Done right, audits should simply reaffirm the status quo if nothing’s amiss.
So one asks again: What are Democrats afraid of?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
