Georgia ballots rejected by machines were later altered by election workers to count

Very recommendable! Long, detailed article!

"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 ...

The 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.

Just the News reviewed 1,604 pages of adjudication logs from Fulton County and reviewed 4820 of the 5064 ballot images where human vote counters reviewed or overrode the Dominion Voting machines. ...

It also raised another troubling question, at least in Georgia, where 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. ...

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. ...

State officials said Fulton County should have adjudicated ballots using a panel of two Democrat judges, two Republican judges and one independent judge, but they did not know for sure whether each ballot went through that process. ..."

Georgia ballots rejected by machines were later altered by election workers to count | Just The News Records obtained by Just the News provide unprecedented glimpse into human adjudication of thousands of ballots, where marks for candidates like Trump were sometimes removed so ballots could count for Biden.