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https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/11/06/antrim-county-vote-glitch-software-update/6194745002/

Michigan election agency: Failure to update software caused Antrim County results glitch

LANSING — A failure to update software was the reason for a computer glitch that caused massive errors in unofficial election results reported from Antrim county, the Michigan Department of State said late Friday.

And a U-M professor of computer science and engineering who specializes in voting systems and securities says it appears the snafu arose from an "unusual sequence of events very unlikely to affect any other jurisdictions."

"The erroneous reporting of unofficial results from Antrim county was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County clerk," the state agency that oversees elections said in a news release.

There was no problem with the voting machines or vote totals, which were preserved on tapes printed from the tabulators, the state said. The problem occurred when the totals by precinct were combined into candidate county-wide totals for transfer to the state, using election management system software, the state agency said in a news release.

"All ballots were properly tabulated. However, the clerk accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results."

Antrim County uses voting machines supplied by Dominion Voting Systems. The same equipment is used by most Michigan counties, especially smaller ones. But the state said the software problem was not related to the Dominion voting equipment. Antrim receives programming support from another company, Election Source, the agency said.

J. Alex Halderman, the U-M professor and voting systems expert, said he has looked into the incident and determined that the problem arose because Antrim officials made a mistake before the election when they loaded a new version of the "election definition" — the data that is similar to a spreadsheet describing the races and candidates on the ballot. The new "election definition" was apparently loaded because officials noticed a specific race had been omitted from the election data, or some similar problem, Halderman said.

"They correctly loaded the new version onto the scanners," associated with the voting equipment, "but accidentally used the old version in the election management system," a separate software package that adds up the votes from different scanners so totals can be reported to the stated, Halderman said.

"Since the scanners and the election management system used slightly different election definitions, some of the positions didn't line up properly," Halderman said. "As a result, when the results were read by the election management system, some of them were initially assigned to the wrong candidates."

State officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether they track when and how local officials update their election-related software or whether local officials are required to report needed updates to the state, once they are completed.

But they said any such errors in any county would be caught during the canvassing process, before results are declared official, when boards composed of two Democrats and two Republicans compare the numbers on the tapes printed from the tabulators to the unofficial results that were reported to the state.

Antrim County on Thursday posted updated and revised numbers for the presidential and U.S. Senate races after discovering major errors in the numbers the county initially sent to the Secretary of State's Office. The effect of the errors gave higher-than-accurate vote totals to Democratic candidates in the heavily Republican county.

The revised numbers — arrived at after manually entering the results from printed tabulated tapes for all 16 precincts — show the northern Michigan county is still red, just not as dark a shade as it was in 2016.