Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/254

 President Trump also promoted a false claim by a different Pennsylvania legislator that Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters. This claim was based on a flawed comparison by State Representative Frank Ryan of the votes recorded by State election authorities as having been cast and those reflected in a separate State registry. In fact, the discrepancy was a result of some counties not yet uploading their official results to the registry. In late-December 2020, Acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue told President Trump that this allegation was baseless. President Trump kept repeating it anyway.

The President and his surrogates made similar false claims concerning excess votes in Michigan. Many of those claims originated with a grossly inaccurate affidavit submitted by Russell Ramsland, the person behind the "very amateurish" and "false and misleading" ASOG report regarding Dominion voting machines in Antrim County. Ramsland claimed in a similar affidavit filed in Federal court in Georgia that 3,276 precincts in Michigan had turnout of between 84% and 350%, with 19 precincts reporting turnout in excess of 100%. Ramsland's affidavit was widely ridiculed, in part, because he relied on data for dozens of precincts that are located in Minnesota, not Michigan.285 Even after he corrected his affidavit to remove the Minnesota townships, his Michigan data remained wildly off-base.

The President and his surrogates repeatedly claimed that ballots for former Vice President Biden were counted multiple times. These claims originated when some noticed election officials re-running stacks of ballots through counting machines. But the allegation is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the vote-counting process—it is routine and appropriate for election officials to re-scan ballots if they are not properly scanned and tabulated in the initial effort. In Costantino v. City of Detroit, the court rejected the "incorrect and not credible" affidavits speculating that ballots were run through scanners and counted multiple times in favor of the "more accurate and persuasive explanation of activity" put forward by the "highly-respected" election official with 40 years of experience.

As with other misguided claims of election fraud, the claim that ballots were counted multiple times disregards the safeguards in the voting process. In particular, as noted above, it would certainly have been apparent in the canvassing process if hundreds of ballots were counted multiple times in Detroit because the total number of ballots would greatly exceed the number of voters who voted. But that was not the case.