You be the judge. Were these ballots in Orange County CA counted more than on once?
This activity allegedly occurred shortly before the facility had received a bomb threat, forcing the evacuation of staff and public observers.
Orange County Registrar of Voters said in a statement:
In his post, Joe Hoft stated: “We don’t know if there is a legitimate reason for the worker’s actions.”
The answer is “Yes.” This video shows an Orange County election worker scanning a batch of ballots three times, but only saving the batch once.
This is shown at the 1:25 mark of the video Mr. Hoft posted when following her third scan of the batch of ballots, a batch report printed from the printer at the end of the table, which she then attached to the top of the batch of ballots. This batch report did not print the first two times she scanned the batch of ballots, meaning she did not save those scans.
She likely scanned the batch of ballots twice and then cleaned the scanner before scanning the batch of ballots a third time because during the first two scans some of the ballots were rejected by the scanner. Given the large number of vote-by-mail ballots we must scan during an election, we must regularly clean the scanners.
We complete quality checks and audits to ensure ballots are only counted once and accurately, including:
- Other Orange County election workers later quality checked the batch of ballots in this video two additional times, making sure the ballots in the batch match the information printed on the report. We do not upload any batch of ballots into the tally until these two reviews are completed.
- Before I certified the results of the election, we audited the results of each of the 171 contests on the ballot. The audit was conducted by randomly selecting one percent of the precincts in the county (23) and then selecting additional precincts (62) until every contest was included. Then four-person audit teams hand counted every ballot in those selected precincts. Our audit teams hand counted about 40,000 ballots for this election. These hand-counted results were compared to the voting system tally, finding that the results of each contest was correct. You can review information about these audits on our website at ocvote.gov/audit.
