After the election, McBroom accepted the thankless job of hunting down the truth about the supposedly Stolen Election. Together with two other Republicans and one Democrat,
McBroom reports, “We have collectively spent innumerable hours watching and listening and reading.” What they found was a mostly well-run exercise in civic duty, slightly smirched by honest mistakes quickly rectified — and then buried in an avalanche of fantasy, fever dreams, grifter fiction and “blatherskite.”.......
On Nov. 3, 2020, Election Day, vote-tabulating machines in Antrim spat out the following results shortly after the polls closed, the committee found. In a county with 22,082 registered voters, 16,044 ballots were cast. A pretty good turnout. Not every ballot included a vote for president. Of those that did, the lion’s share went to then-president Donald Trump: 9,748. Challenger Joe Biden received 5,960 votes.
No surprise. Rural counties in western Michigan reliably vote Republican.
What happened next was very surprising, though. When the results were fed into the county clerk’s spreadsheet, flaws in the spreadsheet design produced a mistaken report that Biden had won Antrim County. But no one was fooled for a minute. Folks in Antrim immediately started looking for the cause of the suspected error. On Nov. 5, they figured out that a number of Trump votes had been improperly entered in the spreadsheet, and a new report was made with Trump’s total corrected.