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…

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.

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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:

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. The JTN review provided an unprecedented window into the extraordinary discretion accorded adjudication judges to interpret a voter’s intent on a flawed ballot.

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.

“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.”…

For instance, “spoiled” was clearly written on ballot number 729-98-76, which had boxes for both Trump and Biden selected. Election judges awarded the vote to Biden and removed the mark for Trump. You can see that here:

But another ballot, 5162-207-61, had the word spoiled written on it and a vote solely for Trump. But it was rejected by the same process, showing just how uneven the system was. You can see that here:

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…

“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…

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…

The alteration and counting of flawed ballots were spread across all races, including state constitutional amendments and local legislative campaigns.

One of the clearest patterns involved the highly watched special U.S. Senate election that pitted Republican incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler against Democratic activist Raphael Warnock. The Just the News review showed the design of the ballot by Raffensperger’s office clearly confused many in the race because it offered 20 candidates, most of them Democrats. Voters often selected two or more of a party’s candidates, causing their votes ultimately to be rejected even after adjudication. Democrats were more likely to be negatively affected…

Jones also made numerous citations raising concerns about how absentee ballots and spoiled ballots were handled. Here are some direct excerpts from his notes:

• “My math is still not zeroing out, so I get a staffer to explain it to me and they realize (after I talk to three and no one listens) that their math doesn’t add up, which prompts a search for more spoiled ballots to make up for the missing seven.”
• “We missed one ballot! — Found during cleanup → I pointed it out to Ralph, otherwise he would’ve missed it or left it unsecured. → Turns out that it was spoiled but written in small print on the back.”…

“Similar actions took place in Detroit, Philadelphia, Green Bay and other major urban centers in swing states where tens of thousands of ballots were interpreted and counted by review panels,” said Phill Kline, the former Kansas attorney general and head of the Amistad Project, which has filed lawsuits to gain transparency in elections…

“With COVID as an excuse, election observers were kicked out of the counting room and private billionaires invited in,” Kline added, citing Mark Zuckerberg’s donations to election judges. “Americans deserve to know how this shadow government managed the election, and state election officials, rather than fighting efforts to understand what happened, should open the doors and support the effort to get at the truth!”

Are you concerned about election and vote-counting irregularities? Share your prayer, below!

(Excerpted from Just the News. Article by John Solomon, Daniel Payne, and Natalia Mittelstadt. Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images).