A Coffey County, Georgia, election official recently posted a video demonstrating how Dominion Voting Systems’ voting software can change a ballot through an “adjudication” step. This step allows the operator to add a mark to a scanned ballot or invalidate a ballot’s vote mark.
“Adjudication” should have been used only to solve problems where the voter’s mark was unclear, such as when the voter filled in a mark that did not clearly show who was voting. However, at least in some Georgia counties, a significant number of ballots appear to have gone through this process. As Coffey County elections official Misty Martin demonstrated, the Dominion system can be set up to allow “adjudication” of all scanned ballots, even blank ballots, and allow operators to make changes to those ballots.
The videos were posted by local news site Douglas Now, whose publisher, Robert Preston, told The Epoch Times that they were shot this week at the local elections office.
“According to our election staff, this Dominion system is flawed, insecure and can be manipulated if someone has the intent to do so.” Preston said in a Facebook text message.
It was not immediately clear how many ballots were “adjudicated” statewide. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
In Fulton County, where the city of Atlanta is located, more than 106,000 ballots had gone through the “adjudication” step as of Nov. 4, said Richard Barron, the county’s elections director, at a Nov. 4 news conference. In all, more than 500,000 ballots were cast in the county. Democrat Joe Biden led with 381,144 votes, compared to 137,240 for President Trump.
Georgia is a key battleground state, with 16 electoral votes. Current results show Biden leading Trump by just under 12,000 votes.
Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt told the Epoch Times via email, “The adjudication process is allowed by Joe State law and election regulations for a bipartisan citizen panel to review a batch of ballots that are flagged by scanning software as having unclear voter intent.”
The panel should include an election worker, a Democratic representative and a Republican representative. Photos taken in Fulton and Gwinnett counties do show the three-person team sitting around a computer screen scrutinizing the ballots.
“It is the bipartisan voter panel, not the election workers, that conducts this review to determine if the voter’s intent is clear.” Corbett said.
The numbers Barron cited, she said, are not the actual total number of ballots that were adjudicated. “When some ballots in a batch are adjudicated, that means all the ballots in that batch, she said, are marked as having gone through the citizen adjudication process.”
Each batch of ballots, meaning dozens of ballots entered into the ballot scanner together.
A Fulton County, Georgia, employee moves voting machines to the Fulton County Election Preparation Center in Atlanta for storage on Nov. 4, 2020.
Corbett did not answer any specific questions, including how many ballots were actually adjudicated within the county, who was on the citizen panel, and whether the panel’s work could be verified through available video footage of the tabulation process.
Yet the social restrictions in response to the Communist virus pandemic do not appear to have affected the group’s work. Many state supervisors, including in Georgia, complained that they were too far removed from election workers to meaningfully observe the work being done.
The Gwinnett County (Georgia) and Fulton County branches of the Republican Party, did not respond to requests for comment on the adjudication process or the citizen panel.
Video from Coffey County shows that any operator of the Dominion software has access to the adjudication process, whether or not an observer is present. The system appears to lack transparency and auditability, according to Martin’s description.
Martin said the software could be set to adjudicate “ambiguous” and “overvoted” ballots, or it could adjudicate all scanned ballots. The operator can then change the ballots without leaving a trace and without knowing who did it or which ballots were changed. The system would only flag at least one ballot in the batch as having been adjudicated, she said, but “there’s no way to track exactly which ballot it was.
Dominion did not respond to emails asking questions about the ruling function.
Gwinnett County, also led by Biden, said only absentee ballots need to be adjudicated because on Election Day, people mark their choices on the machine, which then prints out the ballots, theoretically eliminating the possibility of voter marking errors.
The county says on its website that the adjudication process actually begins weeks before the election because the state Board of Elections allows counties to open absentee ballots and scan them beginning Oct. 19. In fact, because this decision by Joe State violates state law, it is now being prosecuted. The state’s law states that absentee ballots can only be opened on Election Day.
On Nov. 3, the county reported that since Oct. 19, “a total of 5,900 batches of ballots have been completed by the (adjudication) review team.”
Gwinnett County has more than 120,000 absentee ballots, and the 5,900 adjudicated batches could easily cover the total number of absentee ballots in the county. This means that almost every batch of ballots was adjudicated.
People who voted early in person in Georgia were counted as absentee ballots. It is unclear whether the ballots were filled out by hand or marked by machine and whether they were adjudicated.
Gwinnett County did not respond to emails asking questions about the issue.
Another controversy is the need to adjudicate how ballots will be handled. When a scanner cannot read a ballot for some reason, a ballot needs to be copied through a ballot punch. An election worker enters the voter’s choice on a touch screen, and the machine prints out a replacement ballot.
According to videos from the absentee ballot counting center at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, several people are operating a machine that apparently prints replacement ballots, but no one appears to be overseeing the process. A spokesman for the county did not comment on the videos.
The process of duplicating ballots may explain why a Fulton County poll worker testified that she came across a box of ballots with 110 mail-in ballots that were “brand new” and showed no signs of folding. The witness said about 98 percent of the ballots were marked for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Coffey County refused to certify the results, citing problems with Dominion’s software. The Secretary of State’s office blamed the county for the delay in certification.
Dominion is under scrutiny for alleged vulnerabilities in its system. Rep. Matt Hall, a Republican who chairs the Michigan House Oversight Committee, recently threatened to send a subpoena to Dominion’s CEO if he didn’t voluntarily appear before his committee to explain himself.
Last week, a state judge ordered a forensic audit of 22 Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, the same county where 6,000 Trump votes were sent to Biden.
Trump’s legal team said an “independent team” was involved in the forensic audit.
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