Georgia Ballots Rejected by Machines were Later Altered by Election Workers, Marks by Trump Name Removed

As many red and swing states move to audit the 2020 election, there has certainly been a lot of news. It has been hard to make heads or tails of it all. It has been harder to know if anything will come of any of it.

We do know that Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has done a serious about-face. We also know that after Arizona’s audit, one state Senator there, Wendy Rogers, called to recall the electors.

There apparently wasn’t enough support for that to happen, but many laws are being passed to change future elections and scrutiny on past elections continues. A new bombshell report from Georgia just came out that is highly concerning, and many will want to get to the bottom of this.

Jenna Ellis tweeted:

“BREAKING from @jsolomonReports: Georgia ballots rejected by machines were later altered by election workers to count, records obtained show. Some adjudicated ballots had marks removed by Trump name so vote could count for Biden. #ElectionIntegrity

Justthenews.com reported that many ballots that appeared to have been marked for both candidates were rejected, but later edited to go to Biden by workers. You can see the images here. They reported in part:

At 6:10 p.m. ET on Nov. 4, 24 hours after the ballot was first scanned and rejected by Machine 5150, a panel of humans decided the vote should be awarded to Biden, with the notation “mark removed for Donald J. Trump.”

Scores of additional ballots that same day had checks manually removed next to Trump’s name as well as many other candidates up and down the ticket — Libertarians, Democrats and write-ins alike — and the votes awarded instead to other candidates. 

Welcome to the arcane process known as adjudication, where human judgment is substituted for machine scanning in cases where voters incorrectly filled out a paper ballot. Election officials and official observers have dealt with it for years, with everyday citizens mostly oblivious to the process.

But in 2020, adjudication played a much larger role in states like Georgia, which allowed hundreds of thousands of additional citizens to vote absentee for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In all, more than 5,000 of the 148,000 absentee ballots cast — or about 3% — in Georgia’s largest county required some form of human intervention, according to logs obtained from Fulton County by Just the News under an open records act request.

This instance alone would not have flipped the election from Biden to Trump if fixed. But as Justthenews.com reported, it shows a disastrous system vulnerable to human error and misjudgment at best. There should have been much more scrutiny from Raffensperger and Kemp immediately after the election. Many were struck by fear, others may have wanted Trump to lose. It’s hard to tell if enough scrutiny could have flipped things back but voters have seen enough to want a better system, as they don’t trust what’s currently happening.

Ian MacDonald

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