John Solomon reports the number of votes taken away from Trump in Fulton County on ballots that had names REMOVED

John Solomon was asked on OAN about a batch of spoiled ballots in Fulton County where they had names removed, and of those that were ‘unspoiled’ and counted anyway, how many resulted in votes that were taken away from Trump:

 
Solomon says that out of the 1,300 ballots, a few hundred were taken away from Trump in Fulton County.

I checked his site and I believe this is what he’s referring to:

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 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 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.

Instructions on the Georgia Secretary of State’s website, meanwhile, suggest that voters have no choice but to declare their ballots spoiled in the event that they make a mistake on it.

“If you inadvertently make an error, spoil, or otherwise deface the ballot, IMMEDIATELY contact your local county board of registrars or the municipal absentee ballot clerk, whichever is applicable, to receive a replacement ballot,” the instructions dictate.

Just the News identified hundreds of ballots that met that definition but nonetheless were counted as lawful votes after election judges intervened. Some counted ballots even had the word “spoiled” written across them and still were counted.

He makes clear these spoiled ballots are not enough to make up the 13,000 vote difference between Biden and Trump, however he does note it’s also a subset from one county in a large state.


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