Georgia conducted a hand recount. Georgia conducted a machine recount. Neither of these things made a significant difference in either the vote totals or the level of lies Donald Trump and his followers are telling about the election. That was, of course, just one of several recounts that have taken place, none of which have moved the needle significantly. Trump even threw a token $3 million at Wisconsin asking for a recount in just the most Joe Biden-friendly counties. Nothing.
But Sidney Powell’s vast and tangly “kraken” includes a claim that, not only was Hugo Chavez the designer of Dominion Voting Systems tabulating machines, but specific counties were targeted as places to tack on mass dumps of Biden votes. In particular, Antrim County, Michigan, was regarded as the “heart” of this conspiracy theory.
However, as it turns out, Antrim County kept a paper ballot of every single vote. On Thursday, the county went through those paper ballots and the results are shocking…ly consistent with the vote as indicated by the machines.
As the Detroit Free Press reports, a hand tally of every single vote cast in Antrim County did find some Trump votes missed by the machines. Twelve of them, out of 15,962 votes cast.
In the filing made to the Supreme Court earlier this week, Powell stated that Michigan’s legislature had moved to block the appointment of electors supporting Biden. This never happened.
That filing also included a “report” on voting machines in Antrim County written by Russell Ramsland. Ramsland was described as a “cybersecurity analyst” who had testified in multiple cases—a claim that PolitiFact rates as “pants on fire.” What does seem to be true is that Ramsland has filed multiple claims described as “wildly inaccurate.” In this case, the report insisted that a mistake made by a Republican county clerk—which the clerk admitted—was really evidence that the the numbers in Antrim County had been manipulated by Dominion.
Honestly, the claims never made any sense, because Antrim County went for Donald Trump by 4,000 votes. Even if the county went for Trump 100%, it still wouldn’t have made up for even one tenth of the lose he suffered in Michigan. But it didn’t. As the hand count shows, Trump got what he got.
As it turns out, “kraken” is apparently the ancient Norwegian word for “shrimp.”
