Election denial activists on Wednesday seized on errors in a routine Michigan voting report to claim that multiple people were casting ballots under a single voter’s name.
The report was marred by a glitch that made it appear as though some voters had voted more than once, according to the secretary of state’s office. The report was quickly corrected, according to Angela Benander, a spokeswoman for the office.
The glitch was the result of a formatting error in a routine report generated from voter roll files, Ms. Benander said in a statement. The report counted people’s past addresses on separate lines, “resulting in the same ballot for the same voter appearing on multiple lines of information all associated with one unique voter ID,” she said.
“Each of these voters only had one vote recorded for this election,” Ms. Benander said.
The incident underscores the extent to which small glitches and mistakes — which are inevitable in the management of elections by thousands of jurisdictions and all 50 states — can be amplified by a well-organized network of election denial activists bent on elevating false claims to enforce the notion promoted by Donald J. Trump and his allies that Democrats are rigging the election.
In this case, the theory was published Wednesday by Gateway Pundit, a far-right website that frequently spreads misinformation about elections systems. A writer for the site, Patty McMurray, claimed that two co-founders of Check My Vote had issued a “bombshell” report based on Michigan’s absentee ballot information. Check My Vote is one of a number of software systems designed in the last two years enabling election denial activists to track and catch supposedly suspicious votes. But the systems rely on flawed methodology, according to elections experts who have reviewed them.
Check My Vote is a partner of Michigan Fair Elections, a subgroup of the Election Integrity Network. The network is a collection of national, state and local groups formed after the 2020 election and animated by the election lies spread by Mr. Trump and his allies. Ms. McMurray has participated in calls with Michigan Fair Elections, according to recordings of the group’s meetings reviewed by The New York Times.
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