BELLAIRE, Mich. – As of 9 a.m. Thursday, Antrim County is the only county in Michigan that doesn’t have election results in.
The county’s website has election results from its May election, the August and March primaries, and the November 2019 election. So why isn’t there anything reported for the 2020 General Election?
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The short answer is the county is recounting the ballots manually by hand.
Between 1884 and 2016, Antrim County voters have selected Republican candidates in 32 of the 34 national elections. In 2016, President Donald Trump won the county with about 8,500 votes -- nearly twice as many votes as former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received in the county.
When the unofficial results were posted Wednesday morning, former Vice President Joe Biden was in the lead in Antrim County by 3,200 votes, with 98% of the estimated votes reported.
Antrim County clerk Sheryl Guy said the results were “apparently skewed” and the information was pulled from the county website. County officials said the results were incorrect and the vote totals counted by election software did not match the printed count.
Officials said the company that makes the software is cooperating with the county to help find out why the counts did not match.
Antrim County contributes a little more than 22,000 to Michigan’s 8 million registered voters. The recount won’t greatly impact Biden’s 150,000 lead over Trump or Sen. Gary Peters' 88,000 lead over John James, but if there is a counting error, it would greatly impact local elections in Antrim County.
“The priority is to make sure every vote is counted correctly,” said Antrim County public information officer Jeremy Scott. “Rest assured, we are correcting the issue and the system worked.”
Biden won Kent and Saginaw counties, both of which were won by Trump in 2016. However, neither county has the historic consistency of Antrim County. Former president Barack Obama won Kent County in 2008 and, more recently, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won the county in 2018.
In 2016, Trump was the first Republican to win Saginaw County since Ronald Reagan in 1984. The political reversal of Antrim County warrants a more thorough pair of eyes to see if there was a computer or human error in the count.
New -- and more accurate -- results for the county are expected to be released Thursday after an independent board of canvassers verifies the vote count.