Thread by @jacknicas

President Trump just tweeted again about claims of "secretly dumped ballots" for Biden in Michigan.

This is false.

These claims are based on screenshots of a mistaken unofficial tally on one site's election map that was caused by a typo that was corrected in about 30 minutes.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1324108206801563650

I know this because I just spent all day reporting it out.

I spoke to the election official in Shiawassee County who made the mistake; the election-data provider that reported it; and even the Republican consultant who tweeted the images that went viral. nytimes.com/live/2020/2020…

Here is that Republican consultant, @MattMackowiak, owning up to the fact that his screenshots did NOT show election fraud but rather an honest mistake that was quickly corrected.

“I certainly wasn’t intending to make a typo appear fraudulent,” he said.

https://twitter.com/MattMackowiak/status/1324041161321992192?s=20

Matt deleted his original tweet and corrected it.

Yet more than 100,000 people have still shared his screenshots as evidence of fraud -- including the president. (And most won't see his correction.)

This is how President Trump framed it:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1324012341458075648?s=20

Matt took his screenshots from @DecisionDeskHQ, an election data provider.

Data show that shortly after he took his screenshots, Decision Desk corrected the data.

The company then issued this statement:

https://twitter.com/DecisionDeskHQ/status/1324059542343294976?s=20

That clerical error in Shiawassee County was an honest mistake that was quickly corrected.

“All it was is there was an extra zero that got typed in,” Abby Bowen, the elections clerk, told me.

They accidentally reported Biden's unofficial tally as 153,710, instead of 15,371.

In about 20 minutes, a state official called Abby and asked if the number was a typo; Shiawassee doesn't even have that many people. She realized and they fixed it.

Here are the updated figures.
electionreporting.com/county/8f0eb06…

Abby stressed that these were unofficial results. And even if they weren't caught immediately, they would have been before they became official. That requires certification by two Republicans and two Democrats who check all poll books, ballot summaries and tabulator tapes.

This is the system working as designed! A small mistake was made and it was immediately caught and corrected. It happens in all elections.

But this year, we have the president of the United States calling it election fraud and his supporters sharing stuff like this.

Here's the full story on this false claim by the president.

This is not election fraud. This is evidence of a functioning system of checks and balances to ensure our election is accurate: nytimes.com/live/2020/2020…