LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – The national polling company Rasmussen Reports posted a screenshot of a claim gone viral of someone with the same voter ID number in Michigan who appeared to have voted 29 different times on Oct. 25 while having 18 different addresses in two cities.

 

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The X post (formerly known as Twitter) generated nearly 8 million views in a day. The post touched upon a nerve across America as “election integrity” is a key buzzword of this election cycle.

The claim made in the post is disputed. The Secretary of State office acknowledges it was a mistake and has been fixed.

The post went viral.

The post went viral once after it was originally posted on X by Matt DePerno, who ran in 2022 as the Republican candidate for state attorney general. DePerno’s post claimed that according to state’s Qualified Voter File, there were 114,545 Michigan voters that cast 278,113 ballots from multiple addresses across the state.

Scott Aughney, a man who said he considers himself a Republican but isn’t happy with the state party, is an election whistle blower. Aughney is a computer programmer who specialized in data conversion. Aughney has used his background to review election records including Electronic Poll Book raw data files and Qualified Voter Files since
2021.

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Aughney spoke with Michigan News Source and said he doesn’t doubt there are people committing election fraud, but was highly critical of the claim made in DePerno’s post, labelling it “deeply, deeply flawed.”

The report came from a public database known as the Qualified Voter File. Aughney said the more accurate data is in a file called the Electronic Poll Book but said the Secretary of State is doing everything it can to conceal that data.
Aughney said he doesn’t trust the Qualified Voter File because “there is a lot of flaws to those records.”

And the claims of one person voting multiple times based solely on the Qualified Voter Files of multiple votes are something he would not endorse. “They don’t understand the flaws in the data they are looking at,” Aughney said.

The Secretary of State called it a “formatting error.”

“The Qualified Voter File only allows one ballot to be accepted per voter in every election – a formatting error has been corrected,” said Angela Benander, director of communications for the Secretary of State, in an email to Michigan News Source.

“Recently, the Bureau of Elections identified a formatting error in a routine report that shows the list of voters who have cast a ballot in this election either by absentee or early voting ballot. The formatting error in the data export process generated a line in the exported report for each formerly associated address of each individual voter listed,
resulting in the same ballot for the same voter appearing on multiple lines of information all associated with one unique Voter ID. Each of these voters only had one vote recorded for this election. This error in the data export process has been corrected and these erroneous extra lines no longer appear on the report.”

Rasmussen Reports maintains its skepticism.

Rasmussen isn’t buying it. “7.5M Impressions below for what Michigan officials now claim is a ‘mistake’ that they have now ‘fixed.’ Do you believe them? Or are they just fraudsters who got exposed?” the polling company posted on X.