In the latest news from Georgia, vote counters took it upon themselves to count ballots rejected by machines for showing a vote for more than one candidate during the 2020 presidential election.
Indeed, a Dominion Voting machine rejected a series of ballots on election night because the voter filled boxes for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The machine determined neither candidate should get a tally, at which point the ballot moves to human review.
In the first example, on November 4 at 6:10 p.m., just 24 hours after a ballot was first scanned and rejected by the machine, a panel of humans decided the vote should be given to Joe Biden, Just the News reports. An image of the ballot shows the voter put a large blob next to Trump while putting a thinner check next to Biden.
Additional ballots that same day had checks removed from next to Trump’s name, as well as other candidates across the ticket.
This process is known as adjudication, where machine scanning is replaced with human judgement in cases of incorrect ballots.
In total, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast in Georgia’s largest county required some form of human intervention. While adjudication is not necessarily enough to change the Georgia election results, it reveals imperfections in the system.
Language on the ballot reads as follows: “If you make a mistake or change your mind on a section do not attempt to mark through the selection or attempt to erase. Write ‘Spoiled’ across the ballot and across the return envelope” and get a new ballot.
Georgia law says that vote counters must “reject any ballot, including absentee ballots, on which an overvote is detected,” with those ballots to be “manually reviewed” by a panel.
If a voter “has marked his or her ballot in such a manner that he or she has indicated clearly and without question the candidate for whom he or she desires to cast his or her vote,” then the ballot “shall be counted and the candidate shall receive his or her vote.”
State law also says that a ballot should be considered “spoiled” if a voter “cast more than the permitted number of votes.”
However, hundreds of ballots that met the “spoiled” definition were counted.
