Invalid Ballots Crossing the Stream

The stolen election narrative shows no indication of slowing down. One of the allegations thrown around (out of many many others) is from a Republican election observer in Georgia who claims to have seen 56 invalid ballots put into the voting stream.

Turns out this was the subject of a lawsuit which was already dismissed. It seems that the claim is the observer, Sean Pumphrey, left the room entirely, came back, and then saw a stack of 53 ballots that a woman had brought in separately.

Colin McRae, chair of registrars board, testified that the office time-stamps ballots when they are returned. McRae, an attorney, testified that he reviewed each of the 53 ballots in question on Thursday morning before the hearing.

“The time stamps all showed that they were timely received,” McRae testified.

The 53 ballots had been initially separated from the others because they’d been flagged for some reason and required additional review by her staff, said Sabrina German, director of the registrars' office. She said sometimes ballots are flagged so her office can make sure a person hasn’t double voted. Ballots also may be flagged if they are spoiled or have had to be canceled for some reason.

“It’s for the protection of the voter as well as the office,” she said.

Once the 53 ballots were verified as valid they were sent with the others to be counted, she testified.

Good on Pumphrey for doing his job properly and adequately raising this issue. However, after taking testimony, the judge found no evidence the integrity of ballot counting was compromised and dismissed the suit. In his affidavit, Pumphrey makes a conclusory claim that “chain of custody” was not properly followed. Although he had left the room where the ballots were, he claims that his training as a poll observer did not provide him with a satisfying answer as to why the apparently “invalid” ballots got sent back to the valid queue. I looked up the official training manual for poll observers in Georgia. It's only a 100 pages long. It definitely includes some material on chain of custody, but only that form COC-Transfer-ER-19 must be filled out properly. I don't think it's reasonable to expect every certified poll observer to be intimately familiar with the minutiae of the regulations. Accordingly, Pumphrey doesn't specify which rule was violated (again, he wasn't even in the room when this happened). The Trump campaign lawsuit also doesn't specify exactly which procedures were not followed, it simply makes an assertion that "chain of custody was not properly followed" without references to either the form or the manual, and citing only the Pumphrey affidavit.

The chair of the registrars board testified that protocol was properly followed in this instance. If the Trump campaign lawyers disagreed, they had their chance to bring in their own election procedure experts. I'm inclined to believe that an attorney working for the board of registrars knows a hell of a lot more than a poll observer who received his training from a 100-page manual. This is not at all to flatly dismiss Pumphrey's initial claims, but he's not an expert on procedure by any means and ultimately why the case was dismissed.