...Atrim County, Michigan.....

[Chillicothe]

Lets re-visit beautiful…but lightly populated….Antrim County, Michigan. County seat is Bellaire, with it’s population of about 1,100.

If you recall it was much in the news in some circles recently. Dominion voting machines, cheating, stolen election, vote fraud, etc. etc.

In fact, we had a cohort of critics of Antrim’s ability to hold a fair election on this very venue. Some may wish to raise their hand. Judging by their posting history, those skeptics were vehement Don Trump supporters.

And then, the Secretary of State’s office did an audit of Antrim and found no fraud. And then the Michigan GOP led Senate’s Oversight Committee investigated Antrim county…..and found no fraud. In the end, as it was the evening of November 3rd, Don Trump won Antrim County. Handily. Which no one was surprised by. It’s rural Michigan, it is GOP country. Has been for a long long time.

Regrettably, partisan critics made the good poll workers and the county and township clerks appear to be crooks betraying America.

So here is a column from an opinion writer with the Washington Post (see link below). He informs us on some of the details of that Antrim brouhaha. I include it here as a separate thread as it seems to me to be one more example as to why so much of America is so skeptical of the conviction is some quarters that the 2020 election ‘was stolen’.
Plus the columnists fleshes out some of the count's 'irregularities' that sent the partisans on their harmful crusade. THAT is quite informative.

The ‘Stop-the-Steal’ voices have proven themselves so wrong, so unprepared, so uninformed and ill-informed, that their credibility is obliterated. Rudy G,. Krakenpot Powell, Trumps Jr and Sr.; Melissa Carone , Lin Wood, et al, haven’t inspired a whole lot of confidence.
And then comes Antrim County.

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From the column: (btw, what follows is just a small excerpt of a longer article. Think of it as a taster.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/25/antrim-county-michigan-vote-recount-heroes/

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“If you remember that the lower part of Michigan is shaped a bit like a left-handed mitten, look for Antrim County between the tips of the middle and ring fingers. It’s a beautiful place. The Lake Michigan beaches are delightful in summer. The fishing is fantastic year-round. Unlikely as it seems, this is an epicenter of Stolen Election mania.

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.

Alas, now there were more “votes” than actual ballots, so obviously the spreadsheet was still messed up. Antrim officials decided to recount the actual ballots. Back through the counting machines they went, exactly 16,044 of them. On Nov. 6, the tabulators spat out results identical to the original election night numbers: 9,748 for Trump, 5,960 for Biden. This total was eventually certified.

Just to be sure — given the brief confusion — a decision was made to recount the ballots again, this time by hand.

These results were finalized on Dec. 17. The painstaking manual inspection of the ballots found that the machines misread one ballot as a vote for Biden when it was not. Eleven ballots were determined to show Trump votes that the machines could not read. A total adjustment of 12 ballots out of nearly 16,000 presidential votes.

In other words, the original Election Day tabulation in Antrim County was 99.9 percent accurate.

Since then, the Internet and social media have been jammed with wild theories about international conspiracies to hack the vote in Antrim County. In the Joe Friday, just-the-facts tone preferred by McBroom, the report finds:

“Events in Antrim County sparked a significant amount of concern….which led to much speculation, assumptions, misinformation, and in some cases, outright lies meant to create doubt and confusion.” The committee recommends that the Michigan attorney general consider investigating the various lowlifes who have deployed lies “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”
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(I 'bolded' that last sentence as I find it the most heartening of the whole column.)

Beautiful little Antrim, with it’s county seat of a thousand souls, got be-smirched by careless, callous partisans who refused to do their homework. Including some on this venue.

Pity little Antrim County.
https://www.bing.com/maps?q=Antrim County&satid=id.sid:42fe6120-c0ae-4c88-c687-edf161c9ac0e

 

[miketx]

Media told you all this?

 

[Dragonlady]

Can we have a new rule that all stolen election threads go straight to the rubber room. Please enough of this shit

 

[gipper]

Can we have a new rule that all stolen election threads go straight to the rubber room. Please enough of this shit

Only if we can put all those equally delusional threads on Russiagate, straight to the rubber room too.

 

[NightFox]

It’s just part of this ongoing non-falsifiable conspiracy theory of the “stolen election”, where the only evidence to support the conspiracy theory is the conspiracy theory itself.

Antrim just got caught in the cross-hairs because its circumstances happen to have made it a seemingly plausible target to provide some sort of concrete evidence to support the theory, didn’t work out as conspiracy theorists had hoped, so they’ll disparage the results and move on to the next target of opportunity. Ultimately when no credible evidence is uncovered to support the claims the inevitable will response will be along the lines of “We haven’t found any evidence because ‘the system’ prevented us from finding it and the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”

It’s rather like the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster, can’t find any credible evidence despite decades of searching but the monster hunters just KNOW it’s THERE.

 

[wamose]

Liberals are trying real hard to prevent these audits. I smell guilt.

 

[NightFox]

Can we have a new rule that all stolen election threads go straight to the rubber room. Please enough of this shit

If “this shit” upsets you so much DON’T READ IT.

In the meantime , your attempts to effectively suppress threads that you don’t happen to like the topic of only serves to provide yet further evidence of your desire to feed your already enormous confirmation bias.

 

[Chillicothe]

"Media told you all this?"

Well, yeah.
I live a long away from Antrim County, Michigan, and wasn't able to travel there to hand-count the ballots myself.

Accordingly, I relied on: First, a hint on some newsfeed (Politico? The Hill?, I forget) that the Michigan Senate's Oversight Committee had come out with a report determining no fraud in Antrim.

So I then googled the Detroit Free Press reportage on it, figuring that a Michigan newspaper might have closer-to-the-bone coverage.

And then a bunch of other "media" newsfeeds began to report on it. I scan-read several of them.

And then, this morning I saw the treatment in WaPo, read it, thought it was credible.......and posted a thread and a link to it.

All of that is to say......"media" is kinda sorta essential to me as a method to stay informed.
After all, I cannot be all places at once in order to be an eyewitness to developments.
And you?

 

[NightFox]

"Media told you all this?"

Well, yeah.
I live a long away from Antrim County, Michigan, and wasn't able to travel there to hand-count the ballots myself.

Well there you have it, Chillicothe admits to trying to prevent the audits, after all if he/she wasn’t trying to obstruct the truth he/she would have been there hand counting ballots.

Why do you hate democracy Chillicothe ?

 

[lennypartiv]

They don't want to find the fraud.

 

[Chillicothe]

"Liberals are trying real hard to prevent these audits. I smell guilt."

Well, I don't know about that. That's kinda above my pay grade.

But, if the poster read the link he'd find that the 'discrepancies' were promptly detected by the very clerks in Antrim. And because of the long history of GOP support in Antrim they knew that something wasn't right in the transfer to the county's Excel calculations. They knew that right away.
And with their review they determined what specifically was crafted wrong with the spreadsheet formulas.
Experienced Excel users understand well how small errors in building your formulas can produce erroneous results for your columns and/or your rows.

So, to my eye that doesn't look like the county and township clerks were "trying real hard to prevent" an audit.

And then, I'm a tad skeptical that the Michigan Senate's Oversight Committee, led by Republicans in a Republican led Senate chamber, were "trying real hard to prevent" an audit. From what I've read in a handful of reportages is that they took their jobs seriously. As they should, first as responsible legislators; and second, as Republicans who surely recognized that any conclusion that didn't support the 'Stop-the-Steal' mindset could put their own political careers at risk.

But still, they prevailed.

So, while I will respect the posters believe that "liberals are trying hard to prevent these audits"...... in this case, it was Republicans, and presumably, Conservative Republicans given it is in rural Michigan.......that investigated, audited, and hand-counted the ballots.

It doesn't appear "Liberals" had much to do with it, at all.

 

[NightFox]

They don't want to find the fraud.

There you have it, the modus operandi of the non-falsifiable conspiracy theory in all its glory.

 

[Chillicothe]

"Well there you have it, @Chillicothe admits to trying to prevent the audits,"

Ooops!
And right there is the small error in logic that leads to a big error in the conclusion.
See, the assertion by poster 'miketx' is that it is only "liberals" who are trying to prevent the audits.
Accordingly, it couldn't be me.
As I ain't a liberal.
I'm an optimistic skeptic.

 

[TroglocratsRdumb]

And so what about the audits in the other counties and in the other states?

 

[NightFox]

"Well there you have it, @Chillicothe admits to trying to prevent the audits,"

Ooops!
And right there is the small error in logic that leads to a big error in the conclusion.
See, the assertion by poster 'miketx' is that it is only "liberals" who are trying to prevent the audits.
Accordingly, it couldn't be me.
As I ain't a liberal.
I'm an optimistic skeptic.

Well I don’t read what that particular poster writes (waste of bandwidth), but allow me to present the likely conclusion that will be drawn from your “I ain’t a liberal” claim.

You’re a closet “liberal” trying to pretend to be an “optimistic skeptic” in the hopes that’ll it will provide cover for your attempts to block ballot audits.

Welcome to James Bond’s world.

 

[Chillicothe]

CALL:

"They don't want to find the fraud."

RESPONSE:
" See post #11"

 

[Dragonlady]

Can we have a new rule that all stolen election threads go straight to the rubber room. Please enough of this shit

Only if we can put all those equally delusional threads on Russiagate, straight to the rubber room too.

Here’s the difference A$$hat:

50+ court cases, 80+ judges, many of them appointed by Trump and other Republicans, including 9 Supreme Court justices three of whom were appointed by Trump. All cases tossed from court for lack of evidence, lack of standing, lack of a crime. No convictions for any crimes of election fraud which would overturn the results of the election.

The Russia investigation: 10 court cases, 10 convictions/guilty pleas. Special prosecutor outlining hundreds of charges against foreign individuals and others. $42 million in fines, taxes and levies recovered.

One of these things is not like the other. One of them really happened and resulted in charges, convictions and jail time. The other one is an entirely made up scenario which has no evidence to support it.

 

[gipper]

Can we have a new rule that all stolen election threads go straight to the rubber room. Please enough of this shit

Only if we can put all those equally delusional threads on Russiagate, straight to the rubber room too.

Here’s the difference A$$hat:

50+ court cases, 80+ judges, many of them appointed by Trump and other Republicans, including 9 Supreme Court justices three of whom were appointed by Trump. All cases tossed from court for lack of evidence, lack of standing, lack of a crime. No convictions for any crimes of election fraud which would overturn the results of the election.

The Russia investigation: 10 court cases, 10 convictions/guilty pleas. Special prosecutor outlining hundreds of charges against foreign individuals and others. $42 million in fines, taxes and levies recovered.

One of these things is not like the other. One of them really happened and resulted in charges, convictions and jail time. The other one is an entirely made up scenario which has no evidence to support it.

HAHAHAHAHAHA…you don’t realize how delusional that is. You’d think at your advanced age you’d know by now how the establishment operates. Russiagate was an evidence free conspiracy.

 

[Chillicothe]

"And so what about the audits in the other counties and in the other states?"

Here's the way life works in my rural counties, Rdumb.
Trust me on this:
If, after multiple statements to convince folks that one's cow is lost, but.....but those statements prove to be wrong in fact, wrong in intent, wrong in location, wrong in so many way, and often incomplete or misdirected.....well, country folk will say:
"Look Skippy, you seem to be either incompetent or lying with all of these bungled statements. Accordingly, we ain't chasing any of your dang cows...no more. So either pay us all costs up front or we ain't lookin' anymore for your supposed lost Bossie."

I am mildly convinced you understand that dynamic.

So, I will go out on a limb here, and suggest that that is how your concerns about "other counties in other states" will be viewed.

But, good luck.

 

[colfax_m]

They don't want to find the fraud.

You guys call everything fraud and it never is.