Thread by @jacknicas

The claim: “Software glitches” in Michigan & Georgia screwed up vote counts.

The facts: They didn't.

We investigated. Mistakes in two Michigan tallies were due to human error & were quickly fixed. In Georgia, software problems didn’t affect vote counts.
nytimes.com/live/2020/2020…

Let's start with Antrim County, Mich.

Unofficial results had Biden up by 3,000 votes. That didn’t seem right in the Republican stronghold, so election workers checked again.

Turned out they had set up the reporting system incorrectly. They fixed it. Trump had 2,500 more votes.

In Oakland County, Mich., the winner of one local race was changed from Democrat to Republican after election workers caught and fixed a separate human error.

The votes from one city, Rochester Hills, had been mistakenly counted twice. wxyz.com/news/error-in-…

The Michigan secretary of state's office called the issues "isolated user errors" that didn't affect the actual counting of ballots and that were fixed before another layer of checks designed specifically to catch such mistakes.

The full statement: michigan.gov/documents/sos/…

But two errors, both bad for Republicans, were all the evidence many on the right needed.

The Trump bros. & others incorrectly blamed the issues on software and said they signaled wider issues with the vote. Posts & stories like these were shared hundreds of thousands of times.

Again: These weren't software issues; they were human errors that were quickly caught and fixed.

Here's the Republican clerk of Rochester Hills, Mich.: "I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election.”

https://twitter.com/TLBsStory/status/1324868768342962183

Then President Trump tweeted a Breitbart article that tied the Michigan issues to separate problems in Georgia.

This fed a false narrative on the right that widespread "software glitches" had undermined the entire election.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1325096422799237120?s=20

There were software issues in Georgia. But they had nothing to do with counting votes, according to officials & election-security experts.

In Spalding & Morgan counties, issues affected systems that check-in voters. In Gwinnett County, the issue delayed the reporting of results.

“Anyone trying to falsely connect the situations in the two states is spreading misinformation in an effort to undermine the integrity of our elections system,” Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for the Michigan secretary of state, told me. nytimes.com/2020/11/09/tec…

Now the claims are centering on Dominion Voting Systems, the maker of widely used election software.

Many Republicans incorrectly tied the supposed glitches to the company. And the president even retweeted an OANN reporter who suggested Dominion was doing the Clintons' bidding.

Some problems with their claims:

Dominion was used in only two of the five counties that had issues.

And in the one county that had an issue with Dominion software - Georgia's Gwinnett County - it just delayed results. It didn't affect voting or vote counts.

So, when you hear that "glitches" undermined the vote, know that those claims contradict the available evidence.

Humans made mistakes that were quickly caught. And the few known software issues didn't affect vote counts.

From @nicoleperlroth and me: nytimes.com/2020/11/09/tec…