© AP/Carlos Osorio
Ballot issues
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.
A day after the November election, as Donald Trump and other Republican candidates clung to evaporating leads in Georgia, vote counters in Atlanta were confronted by a paper ballot known only by its anonymizing number 5150-232-18.
A Dominion Voting machine had rejected the ballot on election night because the voter had filled in boxes for both Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden,
an error known as an "overvote." The machine determined neither candidate should get a tally, and the ballot was referred for human review.
The image of the ballot, obtained by Just the News, shows the voter messily scribbled a large blob in the box to select Trump as president while also putting a thinner check mark next to Biden's name.
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." You can see that ballot here:
05150_00232_000018_0.pdf
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.
Comment: Global Times has raised some valid points. One theory about the original outbreak does involve Ft. Detrick, whose personnel attended the Wuhan Military Games quite close to when the first cases were noted. Chinese officials have also legitimately asked for more information about a mysterious lung disease, which was attributed to 'vaping' that swept through the US Midwest in the late Summer/ early Fall of 2019. Answers have not been forthcoming from US authorities.