Did Dominion Flip Votes in Antrim County?

Since election night 2020, controversy has swirled around Antrim County in northwest Lower Peninsula.  The reported vote totals showed Joe Biden handily winning the county, and many people (including me) immediately realized that this could not be correct.  The county clerk retracted the results and ordered a retabulation, which produced a reasonable result.  (Trump's margin declined by 233 votes compared to 2016.)

This launched a conspiracy theory about Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of voting machines and vote counting machines.  Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy (R) has explained the problem as follows:

Guy has said Biden appeared to be winning in early, unofficial county results because of a problem that developed when she attempted to update Election Source software on isolated tabulators. Because the update was not applied to all tabulators, results were transposed as they were pulled from the tabulators into the county's main voting software.

I don't understand exactly how this happened, but this sounds like the sort of thing that could happen if a program is not written to account for user errors.

There are all sorts of wild claims about Dominion, from who owns it to how its program in written.  I won't try to evaluate these claims.  Perhaps their software is badly designed or has vulnerabilities.  Even if this were the case, it would not mean that the count for this election were necessarily wrong.  Fortunately, it is not necessary to analyze the machines themselves to know whether they produced an accurate count.

It doesn't make much sense to claim that the initial vote count was the result of vote-flipping.  If the expected margin is off by 40% or so, this will certainly attract attention, and likely lead to a recount, which is what happened.  Vote-flipping could only change the margins by a single digit percentage and remain plausible.

Furthermore, the vote totals in Michigan do not support the claim that Dominion was flipping votes.  I analyzed Michigan' vote totals by county, comparing counties that use Dominion to those that don't.  I found that Trump actually improved from 2016 in counties that use Dominion machines and declined in counties that don't use Dominion machines.  The data provide no evidence to support the theory that Dominion machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden.

A report by Russell Ramsland of the "Allied Security Operations Group" claims that Dominion machines are "intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results."  The report was commissioned due to a (supposedly) unrelated lawsuit over a local marijuana ordinance.  Judge Kevin Elsenheimer, an R former state Republican rep, ordered the release of the report.

The report was disputed by several experts.  One is Christopher Krebs, the first director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.  Krebs was appointed by President Trump in 2018, and was fired after he disputed Trump's claims of fraud.  He said that ASOG "misinterpreted what it saw in the computer coding and used it to "spin" allegations that voting machines couldn't be trusted."

"I'm seeing these reports that are factually inaccurate continue to be promoted. That's what rumor control is all about. That's what I'm continuing to do today, based on my experience and understanding and how the systems work," Krebs said. "We have to stop this. It's undermining confidence in democracy."

I won't try to evaluate the report itself, since it is outside my area of expertise.  However, I can consider the credibility of the person who wrote the report.  Russell Ramsland has previously filed affidavits in lawsuits alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential election.  One affidavit claimed that various townships in Michigan had over 100% turnout.  The townships were actually in Minnesota, not Michigan, and turnout was not over 100%.  Another affidavit claims that turnout in detroit was 139%, when it was actually 51%.  It also claims false turnout rates for many other jurisdictions in Michigan.

All the controversy led the Michigan Bureau of Elections and Antrim County to conduct a hand recount in Antrim County.  It found a 12 vote gain for Trump, which is well within the range of error that you would expect when a few people don't mark the ovals clearly.  Thus the corrected vote count was accurate.  There was no vote-flipping in Antrim County.

This raises the question of why the Trump Campaign never asked for a recount in Antrim County.  Indeed, they never asked for a hand recount anywhere that uses Dominion machines.  They did ask for recounts in Milwaukee and Dane County in Wisconsin, which use a different vendor.  The Wisconsin recounts found no vote-flipping.  In Georgia, a hand recount was conducted automatically; it was not requested by the Trump campaign.  The recount found some human error; it did not find any vote-flipping.

So why didn't the Trump campaign request any hand recounts in jurisdictions that use Dominion vote counting machines?  The inescapable conclusion is that they don't believe that vote-flipping happened.  Is it possible that the Trump campaign would like people to believe that the election was stolen, and it doesn't want to produce evidence contrary to that belief?