“There was only one extra zero entered,” said Abigail Bowen, the election officer for Shiawassee County, Michigan, northwest of Detroit. “It was caught quickly,” she added. “That’s why we have these checks and balances.”
When Ms. Bowen and her team sent the county unofficial vote count to Michigan officials early Wednesday, they inadvertently reported Mr. Biden’s number as 153,710 when it was supposed to be 15,371, she said. About 20 minutes later, she said a state election official had called her to ask if the number was a typo. Shiawassee County doesn’t even have that many residents. Ms. Bowen said she had corrected the number and that Number has been updated.
“All of these numbers are unofficial. Even if they hadn’t been caught last night, they would absolutely have been caught before we submitted our official results,” she said. A team of two Republican and two Democratic advertisers are reviewing all of the county’s election books, ballot summaries, and tabs to confirm the results before finalizing them, she said.
“As for Shiawassee County, I feel the elections went very well,” she said.
However, on social media, the county has been a strong example of election fraud. Posts highlighting the apparent sudden surge in the number of Mr. Biden in Michigan have been shared more than 100,000 times, and conservative websites have published stories with headlines such as, “Very strange: Michigan found over 100,000 ballots and each one bears Joe’s name Biden. ”
Matt Mackowiak, a Texas Republican adviser, posted the screenshots of the voting card on Twitter and watched them go viral quickly and eventually shared by the president himself. Twitter ended up calling Mr. Mackowiak’s post controversial or misleading, and the company stopped people from simply sharing it.
