Confusion surrounding voting tallies in Michigan has been addressed by the Michigan secretary of state's office, which confirmed that a formatting error led to discrepancies in the data. The office clarified that no additional votes were counted due to this error.
The issue arose following viral claims suggesting that more ballots were cast during Michigan's early in-person voting period than there were identified voters in the state. These claims were linked to a post by Matthew DePerno, a former nominee for attorney general in Michigan who has faced legal charges related to voting machine tampering.
In his post, DePerno alleged that a review of Michigan's Qualified Voter File revealed instances of one voter ID recording multiple votes at different addresses, leading to over 160,000 excess ballots being cast. This sparked widespread allegations of illegal voting in Michigan on social media.
The Michigan secretary of state's office attributed the confusion to a formatting error in a routine report that listed voters who had cast their ballots. The error resulted in the same vote being associated with former addresses of individual voters, creating multiple lines of information for one unique Voter ID.
The office stated, 'Each of these voters only had one vote recorded for this election. This error in the data export process has been corrected, and the erroneous extra lines no longer appear on the report.'
Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump also addressed the situation, confirming that the duplicates caused by the glitch in the system would not be counted.
When questioned about the explanations provided by Trump and the secretary of state's office, DePerno dismissed the formatting error as an 'export issue.'
James Blair, the Trump campaign's political director, mentioned that they were reviewing DePerno's observations and would take appropriate action after a thorough review of the situation.
