Michigan’s Cheboygan County voted on June 22 to authorize a hand recount of the 2020 election.
Cheboygan County Board of Commissioners voted 4-3 to authorize a letter to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) requesting the recount, according to The Hill.
In the letter (pdf), the text of which appeared in a packet for the board meeting, the board’s chairman, John Wallace, wrote that a hand recount would help determine “whether 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.”
The requested audit would also seek to determine whether the machines by Dominion Voting Systems and Election System and Software were connected and had modems installed enabling them to connect to the internet, whether the machines were in communication with any unauthorized computers and if “there is any evidence that any unauthorized computer actually manipulated the actual presidential election vote tally within Cheboygan County.”
The request by Cheboygan County is the latest in a series of Republican-led efforts to verify the results of the 2020 election, similar to the audit taking place in Arizona’s Maricopa County.
Benson would have to approve the request for the process to go forward. She has been highly critical of the Arizona audit and promoted a report on June 22 that pointed to alleged shortfalls of the Maricopa inquiry.
“Calling something an audit does not make it an audit, and this report details all the ways the so-called #AZaudit is actually not an audit at all – but instead a taxpayer-funded disinformation party with serious implications for the future health of our democracy,” Benson wrote on Twitter.
On the day of the Cheboygan County vote, a Michigan state lawmaker introduced a bill that would authorize partial statewide audit, according to The Detroit News. The bill, introduced by Rep. Steve Carra (R), would set up a bipartisan board and hire a contractor to carry out the audit. The review, if authorized, would cover 10 percent of the precincts in each of the state 83 counties and 20 percent of the precincts in Detroit, the populous Democratic stronghold.
In Pennsylvania a day earlier, state Sen. David Argall (R) told reporters he would back a statewide audit similar to the one being conducted in Maricopa County, according to The Hill.
“It’s a very careful recount, forensic audit, so yeah, I don’t see the danger in it,” Argall said, according to The Hill. “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.”
