Ballot adjudication in Fulton County, 2020
The November 2020 election seems like it took place a very long time ago. Slowly, ever so slowly, more of the details are emerging about how absentee ballots fared. We may never know whether or not the problems they raised actually changed the results of that election, although it’s certainly very possible. However, the rules that were in place in many states were highly vulnerable to both error and fraud, and truly negligent in terms of trying to prevent those things.
For example, let’s take Fulton County, Georgia, and the subject of ballot adjudication. That occurs when a paper ballot is marked in such a way that it confuses the machines reading it and gets rejected. There are rules about what happens next, but they are confusing and subject to exploitation.
The link I’ve just given is to a highly informative article, and I suggest you read the whole thing; it covers more than adjudication. But here’s an excerpt on that subject:
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.
The [Fulton County] adjudication ballots alone are not enough to change a Georgia election in which Biden and Trump were separated by less than 13,000 votes. However, they reveal an imperfect system vulnerable to chaos, subjectivity, or political dirty tricks, especially in a county like Fulton where state officials documented widespread irregularities and misconduct and now want to take over election counting.
Adjudication hardly represented the only problem. But it represented a sizeable wild card introduced into the process, and even if the people doing the adjudicating had been trying desperately to be fair and evenhanded, the rules were so confusing that it would have been difficult. For example:
…[I]n Georgia,…election regulations create two conflicting imperatives. One regulation, which is quoted on each absentee ballot, emphatically declares that a paper ballot should be deemed “spoiled” and uncountable if a voter makes any mistakes or unauthorized marks.
“If you make a mistake or change your mind or change your mind on a selection 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, language on each ballot reads.
Just the News reviewed hundreds of ballots that met the “spoiled” definition — ballots that voters had in some way altered, defaced, or corrected — that were still allowed to count after adjudication. The reason? Another Georgia regulation gives election officials broad discretion to try to determine the intent of a confused voter, and actually encourages them to find a way to make flawed ballots count.
The Georgia code stipulates that voting tabulators must be programmed to “reject any ballot, including absentee ballots, on which an overvote is detected,” with those ballots to be “manually reviewed” by a review panel following their rejection.
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,” the state code says elsewhere, then the ballot “shall be counted and such candidate shall receive his or her vote.”
Yet state law also directs that a ballot should be considered “spoiled” if, in part, a voter has used it to “cast more than the permitted number of votes.” A spoiled ballot “shall not be reinstated,” the code states, suggesting that any ballots deemed as such should not be counted.
…Some counted ballots even had the word “spoiled” written across them and still were counted.
You can find examples on some pictured ballots at the link.
More:
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said it did not have an immediate response on whether such spoiled ballots should have been allowed to go to adjudication, saying it was studying the matter. Raffensperger has said, however, Fulton County’s election processes are so flawed he believes the state of Georgia should take it into receivership.
Oh, so now he tells us.
There’s a report on this and other voting process problems in that county alone:
Raffensperger’s handpicked election monitor for Fulton County compiled a 29-page report identifying voting irregularities that occurred in the Atlanta vote counting center, including documented problems with spoiled and adjudicated ballots.
Fulton County refused to answer any questions about the records they provided to Just the News.
But Bridget Thorne, who has worked for years in various election jobs in Fulton County, said officials there did not have clear instructions for handling spoiled or adjudicated ballots last fall.
“According to a Fulton County Board member, there were no written adjudication processes given to adjudicators,” Thorne told Just the News. “Processes were given verbally. In the event the Democrat and the Republican adjudicators could not agree, [county executive] Ralph Jones would decide.
“Based on my experience, it is not surprising that they did not have a standard written process for adjudicators,” she added. “An internal audit financial report that came out on Wednesday also states that they are missing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).”
If I retained my capacity to be shocked at this sort of thing, I would be shocked.
What’s more [emphasis mine]:
The Just the News review shows adjudication judges have the power to “remove marks” and or “add marks” to reflect a voter’s assumed intention and did so hundreds of times in Fulton County alone. They also can reject them. And at least in Georgia last November, they made such decisions one to four days after Election Day had ended, when preliminary vote counts showed who was leading or losing in close races…
Scores of adjudicated ballots ultimately were resolved with the notation “removed mark” next to Trump’s name, in most cases allowing a second mark next to Biden’s name to count. But at times it happened in reverse too, or to the detriment of third-party candidates.
If these problems aren’t eliminated before 2022, the situation will remain highly suspect and vulnerable to error and manipulation.
The fraudsters have successfully muddied the water so that the election, while stolen, can never successfully be reconstructed. The Democrats are determined to steal the 2022 election, which may be a more difficult task, and now is the time to prevent that.
The Georgia code stipulates that voting tabulators must be programmed
Get rid of the software and return to analog tabulators.
We may never know…
That’s the thing about black box voting systems, isn’t it?
Wait, wasn’t the reason we switched to these systems simply to avoid the “hanging chad” guesswork of what the voter “meant” to do?
FACT IS. If you can’t figure out how to get your pencil mark vaguely inside a fucking circle, maybe your vote should be discarded…? :-/
neo states,
“the rules that were in place in many states were highly vulnerable to both error and fraud, and truly negligent in terms of trying to prevent those things.”
From 2016 forward… is there any doubt that elements in the democrat party would take advantage of those circumstances? That they’d be unaware of them? That they’d resist temptation, consider it anything but an opportunity? That the leadership would not evaluate the risk of Trump’s reelection and agree to any means necessary to prevent that outcome?
” If these problems aren’t eliminated before 2022, the situation will remain highly suspect and vulnerable to error and manipulation.”
In any State where democrats hold the governorship, it’s unlikely that the problems will be addressed.
In any State where democrats in the State legislature can block addressing the problems, they will do so.
In any State where democrats control the legislature, it’s a cast iron cinch that they are quietly working to expand the means to fraudulently swing future elections.
This is not speculation, it is simply the nature of the beast.
OBloodyHell,
Florida, the epicenter of hanging chads in 2000, seems to have corrected their system. It’s do-able. Seems like Georgia didn’t want a correct system.
I’m with OBloddyHell on this: any extraneous marks on a ballot outside the circle that is to be tabulated voids the ballot permanently. No more election judges “devining” how the voter “intended” to vote.
In Nevada, we have supermajorities of Democrats in both houses, and a Democrat governor. The Governor decreed that ballots would be mailed to every voter in the state because of Covid. The voter rolls had not been updated in years, and the result worked out so well for the D’s (we had 10,000 more votes counted than ballots sent out) that the governor and legislature want to repeat the process in the next election. There is not a hope in hell that our next election will be any better than the last one. Perhaps when the entire state turns out like San Francisco (our homeless population is surging right now), things will change. Short of that, Republicans might as well not bother running here.
I don’t think it’s true “that we may never know whether or not the problems they raised actually changed the results of that election”. I think it’s pretty clear that they did. The evidence of irregularities in the election coupled with the statistical anomalies of the results make it obvious that the election was stolen. We might not be able to reconstruct the results so that we know exactly how many ballots were fraudulent but that is different question than whether the fraud changed the results. Why would they bother to cheat so obviously if it wasn’t necessary to change the results?
Fulton County is the home of the infamous ballot stuffing surveillance videos. A man rolled boxes of ballots into the counting room and hid them under tables before the Republican monitors arrived in the early morning. The ballots were then pulled out after the Republican monitors left and “counted” by the remaining Democrat counters. Each one would take a stack of the ballots and run it through the vote tabulator three and four times before moving onto a new stack. The lawyer presenting these videos at the Georgia Senate hearing estimated that with the number of machines in operation they were able to count 18,000 “votes” before leaving for the night.
From my analysis of the Edison voting data, Biden only caught up to Trump at 8 pm on 11/5/2020 even with all the fraud. Biden’s lead didn’t reach 10,000 until the evening of 11/7.
My suggestion would be to require half the counters to be Reps and half Dems chosen by their respective parties. Then have them individually count the same ballots. If the counts didn’t agree, do them over again.
Gregory Harper:
I disagree.
I agree that it’s “clear” and “obvious” that there was fraud and that there was negligence that led to errors in many states and that this may have changed a Trump victory into a Biden victory.
However, the number of votes that were attributable to fraud (which if plentiful enough would make the election “stolen”) versus those attributable to errors and negligence (not exactly “stolen”) in each state is unclear. Then it is also unclear how many of the errors went in Biden’s direction and how many in Trump’s.
Lastly, it’s not clear whether there were enough fraudulent votes plus errors in each state to have made enough states go to Trump that he would have won.
And I believe these things will never be known.
Neo: I know I don’t need to rehash all the changes to election laws that were made in key states, using Covid as an excuse, which allowed the potential for election fraud through widespread use of mail-in voting with no ID requirements. Nor do I need to remind you of the urgency that the Democrats have put on the passage of HR-1, which you have said many times would result in a permanent Democrat majority (I’m paraphrasing). I think we agree that the purpose of these election law changes is to facilitate fraud so that the Democrats can win any reasonably close election.
You say it’s not clear whether there were enough fraudulent votes plus errors in each state to have made enough states go to Trump. I think it is clear. We are only talking about a relative handful of states (Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona) with very small margins.
I agree that it is very hard to reconstruct the election to determine what the results would have been without the fraud and errors, and we will never know exactly what happened but I have no doubt that fraud put Biden over the top.
I spent most of my career at the Census Bureau producing population estimates for counties and cities and looking for anomalies in our estimates that would indicate errors in our data. Even before I knew anything about particular charges of fraud, I strongly suspected that there was something wrong with the 2020 election results just by looking at the results in historic bellweather counties. Yes, it is theoretically possible that Biden won the election fair and square but I would bet everything I own that he didn’t.
Gregory Harper:
I suppose it depends what you mean by “clear.” I mean the sort of evidence that would hold up in a court of law. “Strongly suspect” isn’t what I mean.
Although Biden “won” by umpty-million votes we are told, when it came to the Electoral College and key states, if 43,000 votes were flipped in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Trump would have won.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-gop-came-within-90000-votes-of-controlling-congress-and-keeping-the-white-house-n2584521
I’m not sure exactly how that math works out, but if one could show beyond a doubt that many votes were stolen in the right states … Biden would still be president. Though it still is a meaningful effort and ought to put some teeth in fraud reform.
I get confused and angry when I sense the implication that finding fraud is only important if one can prove the margin of fraud turned the election.
It’s like if a person is shot, but not killed, it’s somehow not important to bring the shooter to justice.
huxley:
Election fraud needs to be stopped no matter what the magnitude.
Paul in Boston posted this comment yesterday, and it seems very appropriate to bump it to here.
AesopSpouse and I watched the video and were (as the saying goes) totally gobsmacked.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/08/11/the-delta-variant-as-contagious-as-chicken-pox/#comment-2569738
The Commenters at CTH delve into the possible flaws, and the reasons why Dr. Frank may be onto something. It does look too good to be true, but after the last 5 years, I’ll believe anything up to and including a Hydra complex in the NYC subway catacombs
To Gregory Harper – could you put your Census expertise to work and tell us if there is any “there” here?
In a nutshell (although simplified and condensed, and I hope I convey it correctly), Dr. Douglas Frank* explains that the (alleged) ballots received/counted can be “sorted” by the age of the purported voter (this is without looking at what’s on the ballot, just that there presumably was one with some “voter’s” ID on the envelope/register), and that the number of ballots for the group of voters of each age (18 to 101) is a certain percentage of the estimated population for that age (based on the official “extrapolation” of the 2010 Census to 2020), although it’s a different percentage for each age.
This gives a matrix of 83 percentages relating estimated population to ballots.
That’s just basic math, nothing strange.
He found that, by reverse-engineering one county in a state to get its percentages matrix (going backward from the data on ballots received/counted to the artificial “2020” census), he could predict the number of ballots, by age, in every other county in that state, with 95-99% accuracy, by applying the same matrix to each county’s “population”.
(Note that, if this is the case, it doesn’t matter which county is analyzed first.)
A different matrix was calculated and applied to registrations-by-age in one county to predict ballots in all the others, with even better accuracy.**
He started with Pennsylvania, naturally. Then, after being challenged, he found that, although Ohio had a different matrix of percentages, it was also the same for every county in that state. I think he said he ran the data for 30 states, Red and Blue, with the same results, but don’t hold me to that number.
The point is that there is no conceivable natural explanation for a uniform state-wide relationship of population or registration to ballots. And, as one CTH commenter remarked, it is much more likely that counties in different states that are physically adjacent to each other would have the same matrix, rather than sharing the matrix of a demographically different county in their own state.
The assumed goal (if I understand correctly) was to generate a “ceiling” on ballots that could be reasonably presumed to be greater than the actual number cast (hence the remarkable “voter participation” numbers of 70% and greater in places that historically never got anywhere near that high), so that, once the real ballots were counted, fraudulent ones could be physically (or electronically) inserted into the “gap” with the needed adjustments to get the vote counts desired by the manipulators.
The background explanation is important, but the “kernel” starts at 26:00; put the play-back speed at 25% at 27:00 to follow the sequence of graphs better. Remember, after calculating the matrix for one county, he is predicting the ballot distribution for the others BEFORE looking at the actual data from the election.
(I would like to see the actual numbers, but I suspect they are posted on-line somewhere and it’s late in the day to go looking.)
*His vitae look pretty credible, but scientists can let confirmation bias get the better of them no matter what their politics are
https://truthandliberty.net/bio/dr-douglas-g-frank/
**Some commenters seemed to think Dr. Frank was predicting registrations also, but I don’t think that’s what he meant, although I can see how that interpretation could be gleaned from his presentation.
This comment by Battleship Wisconsin is particularly informative.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/08/10/stunning-video-explanation-dr-douglas-frank-shows-how-the-2010-census-was-used-to-create-the-algorithm-that-fabricated-the-2020-electronic-vote-outcome/comment-page-2/#comment-7967127
An explanation of why this analysis may explain how the scam was worked.
The algorithm “keys” are the matrices I described above.
https://www.educationviews.org/physicist-proves-pre-set-algorithms-stole-the-2020-elections/
The adjudication issue was addressed fairly early on.
I’m not sure of the percentages, but whereas in elections prior to 2020, a relatively large number of mail-in ballots was tossed out (5%? 7%? more? I just don’t recall), in 2020, there were far less (less than 1%?) that were tossed (and that percentage may actually be less, i.e., merely several percentiles, e.g., 0.4%? 0.2%)—once again, IIRC. But you get the general idea.
And so: WHERE DID ALL THOSE ADJUDICATED VOTES GO?
Answer: Just another headscratcher….
Keeping in mind that BIDEN WON THE MOST VOTES IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!!!!!!! (And every day that passes shows us why…. Yes, I’m talking about the charm, the sheer intellect, the charisma, the acuity, the cleverness, the foresight, the empathy, the stick-to-itiveness, the drive, the ability to see all sides of the issue, the expertise in choosing advisors, the wisdom, the judgment…and the most obvious: the unrelenting, endless love of his country and his people, along with his poignant calls for unity….)
Should be “its people”….
That the whole voting count was to be fraud really isn’t a surprise. That this is but 1 kind in a country that had at least 5 if not more states that a fair election didn’t happen is a bit of a remarkable accomplishment.
From Geoffrey Britain (above:
“the rules that were in place in many states were highly vulnerable to both error and fraud, and truly negligent in terms of trying to prevent those things.”
From 2016 forward… is there any doubt that elements in the democrat party would take advantage of those circumstances?
Is any information available on how deeply the Democrats may have been involved in creating those circumstances? I would be at least a little surprised to not find Dem fingerprints on it.
Barry Meislin – I recall that the mail-in ballot rejection rate decreased by an order of magnitude in some states. It’s pretty clear that they were counting any ballot that came through the door. That’s completely consistent with court orders and rogue secretary of state orders nullifying signature matching requirements.
Did it make a difference in the presidential election? Maybe, but when you go from about a 1% rejection rate to about a 0.1% rejection rate, then you consider that mail in ballots were less than all of the ballots cast, then you consider that at least some of the mail in votes were cast for Trump, it’s tough to see the total effect swinging more than a tenth of a percentage point or two to Biden.
Add this to neo’s reference to ballot adjudication, the PA Court’s funny business on return deadlines, the illegal ad hoc drop boxes in blue precincts, etc. and with a presidential election as close as 2020 was, it’s certainly conceivable that Trump may have been the legitimate winner and likely that we’ll never know for sure. (It’s also a certainty that if Trump had won again while losing the so-called popular vote and his win was attributable to rejected mail-in ballots or Republicans shutting down Democrats’ “creative” interpretations of election law, the left would have completely lost it. Trump’s capitol riot is child’s play compared to what the left would have done.)
https://news.ballotpedia.org/2021/04/20/the-daily-brew-checking-in-on-ballot-rejection-rates-from-2020/
“…when you go from about a 1% rejection rate…”
You’re quite sure it was a 1% rejection rate?
Guess again!
Barry Meislin – There’s no need to guess. Look at my link. If you have reason to doubt that data, let me know.
There were some outlier states that had pre-2020 rejection rates at 5%+, but most were around 1% before 2020. Most, including a number of very red states, went down to about 0.1% in 2020. Exact numbers are at the link, but that’s more or less it.
Now Georgia had the highest pre-2020 mail-in rejection rate of the states that have reported at 6.4%, and they went down to 0.4% last year. So you find the percentage of the total vote that was mailed-in. Assume that about 6% of that of that percentage wouldn’t have counted before 2020. Then you have to assume that the potentially-improperly-counted votes broke between Biden and Trump the same as the rest of the mail-in vote (or prove another distribution). I did the math in November and came up with a potential swing to Biden that was a few thousand votes less than his margin of victory, but as you can see there’s necessarily a lot of guesswork in the calculations. Also, even if you flip Georgia, you have to also flip Arizona and Wisconsin to change the outcome, obviously.
Frankly, neo is right. It may be impossible to prove what the outcome would have been without all the funny business from Democrats. The best approach going forward is exactly what the state level Republicans are doing. Make things clear and remove as much subjectivity as you can. (E.g., matching drivers license numbers instead of signatures, etc.)
It’s amazing how simple problems like filling out a ballot are made into an insurmountable mountain with its flanks covered with an impenetrable jungle of doubt.
Is it that hard? Use an electronic machine that prints on ballot forms. The voter makes their selection of candidate for each race. The machine prints a perfect ballot. Presto! The voter reviews their ballot choices and ensures they are correct before putting it in the box and is 100% responsible for their cast vote. No longer possible to have doubt or the need to interpret when the vote is read. And a hard copy is kept.
The common denominator to all of the voting problems is people. People are error prone, people lie, people cheat, people are opinionated. People are totally incapable of holding any kind of fair election. People need to be eliminated from the entire voting process. From casting ballots to counting votes to tabulating results, people must be removed from the democratic election process.
AesopFan: I haven’t paid too much attention to Mike Lindell’s claims of massive cyber voting fraud. He seems to have fallen down the same rabbit hole as Lin Wood and Sydney Powell. Massive cyber fraud was not necessary to steal this election, a relative handful of illegal ballots and a few corrupt election officials were enough to do the trick.
I did watch part of Dr. Frank’s presentation and read much of the commentary. I am skeptical of his claims but they should be easy enough to prove or disprove. I don’t know what files he was using to compare the 2010 Census age distributions to. It’s not something I would want to spend a lot of time doing.
I think Biden had broad but very shallow support in 2020. I think Democrat operatives were shocked at the level of Trump support, despite all the media manipulation, and had to resort to a sloppy Plan B to find the necessary votes.
I remain convinced that the election was stolen not just because of statistical anomalies, or the rule changes that facilitated fraud in the same states that had their results swing in Biden’s favor at the last minute, or the evidence that illegal ballots were counted, but all these factors taken together. I think the chance that there was not meaningful fraud in the election approaches zero.
As to Neo’s point about evidence that would stand up in a court of law, well that would depend on the court and the people hearing the evidence. I imagine a truly impartial court unconcerned with retribution would likely conclude that the amount of fraud was greater than the margin of Biden’s victory. But I think they would also conclude that the election was so flawed and the documentation so lacking, that determining the actual number of votes each candidate should have received is impossible. And we don’t have a constitutional mechanism for a do-over.
Aggie:
You are describing an in-person voting process. It’s not too hard to design a fairly reliable in-person voting process that makes it fairly hard (although not impossible) to commit fraud. What is being described here involves mail-in ballots, which were hugely increased in 2020, on purpose.
Also, it turns out that even with a process such as the one you describe, many people don’t examine their ballots before submitting them.
I believe COVID is Chinese bio-warfare, unleashed to prevent Trump’s re-election and to enable widespread vote fraud.
The country has been in all probability mortally wounded as a result. We have an evil and corrupt Biden administration, which is akin to a case of pneumonia in an aged person. Recall the old pre-antibiotic aphorism that “Pneumonia is the aged pensioner’s friend”.
China is triumphant. Stick a fork into the USA: she is done.