Allison Donahue: Trump shares inaccurate map of Michigan election results, calls it fraud. It was a typo.
Michigan Advance, November 5, 2020
President Donald Trump and a slew of other conservative Twitter accounts shared an inaccurate electoral map of Michigan on Wednesday and claimed that hundreds of thousands of votes for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden were fraudulently “found.”
The reality? Shiawassee County Clerk Caroline Wilson made a mistake entering the data and the error was quickly fixed.
However, it wasn’t fixed before Trump retweeted the inaccurate map and wrote “WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?” on Wednesday morning.
Twitter has since flagged the information in the tweet as “disputed and might be misleading.”
According to the unofficial results reported in the map, 138,000 ballots had come in and all of them went to Biden.
What really happened, Shiawassee County election clerk Abby Bowen told FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that monitors accuracy in political news, is that “there was an extra zero added on the end when Biden’s votes were keyed in.”
Shiawassee County reported Biden received 15,371 votes, but accidentally typed in that he received 153,710 votes. The county only has 55,612 registered voters.
“This is why we have the checks and balances,” Bowen said. “This is no kind of voter fraud. It was literally just a typo.”
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called on members of the media and people watching election results “to help us ensure accurate data and information is what is discussed in the ecosystem right now as opposed to false or misleading claims.”
The data was shared through a map by Decision Desk HQ, an election data-gathering firm, which has since updated the map to show the accurate data.
President Donald Trump’s campaign on Wednesday afternoon filed a lawsuit in the Michigan Court of Claims to halt the counting of remaining ballots in the state, claiming his team didn’t have “meaningful access” to the counting process.
As of Thursday morning, multiple news outlets have called the race in Michigan for Biden and he currently holds at least 253 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
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