Akton
Member
It's hard to keep track of all the various claims of election fraud, but this one in particular caught my eye when I saw it on twitter because it was one of the first ones that I have seen so far which seems at least plausible to me and is not able to be very quickly debunked. It doesn't seem to have spread very far, so I haven't found any debunkers who have had their way with it yet. I figured I would give it a go and let everyone else check my work.

The full affidavit quoted in the tweet makes a lot of allegations, and most of them don't seem like the kind of thing that ought to be taken seriously (including a claim that cars that dropped off lunch must have been dropping off fake ballots because the witness did not see any lunch). The first allegation got my attention though because of the technical nature of it. The witness seems to be alleging that many ballot counters were not properly discarding batches of ballots before resubmitting them to the scanner after removing a problematic ballot, resulting in the batch being counted twice. In this case, "discard" does not seem to mean throwing out the ballots, but simply not submitting them to be counted and allowing them to be run back through the scanner.
Looking into this myself, I found the Michigan government website that includes information on which voting systems each county uses. We can see that in Wayne county, the tabulator was the "ImageCast Precinct". In order to understand how it is used, I found what I believe to be the user manual for this system here. On pages 26-28 you can find information about discarding batches.

This section in particular stood out to me because it seems to describe roughly the situation the witness is talking about, but it describes a different protocol than the one she says is normal. More specifically, it seems to recommend one that could easily be mistaken by an observer as double-counting the ballots. I will admit the writing is not super clear, but it seems to be saying that when you go through the output bin and remove the offending ballot, you are supposed to send all the ballots removed from the tray during your search back through, since the system will not have scanned them yet (it stopped when it detected a bad ballot). It does not instruct the user to discard the batch before rescanning the entire batch. Now this section of the manual is not describing a jam, but it is describing something very similar. CTRL+F'ing the manual doesn't show any results for "jam", though this section does talk about something "stopping" the machine, which is what jam does, so I figure it is the most applicable.
(edited the above paragraph because I realize I was misunderstanding something about the system. It makes more sense to me now)
This seems to cut against the allegation, but I am posting this here because I am not 100% sure I have found the correct manual, and don't have much knowledge of how voting machines work. Furthermore, the manual itself is confusingly written in my opinion. I actually can't tell if it's talking about putting only the ballots that haven't gone through the machine back through, or if it's talking about putting all the ones that already have back through. The text seems to imply that the user is taking things from the output tray and putting them back in the input tray, but that they are somehow "non-scanned" even though they have gone through and are now in the output tray. Perhaps when the system detects an error, it deletes the scans from its memory of all ballots in the batch, so they are now "non-scanned" despite being in the output tray. In any case, however, the batch is not to be discarded and scanning should continue.
I have only posted an except of what I consider the most relevant portion here, but I invite everyone to read pages 26-28, as well as any other parts they think may be important to better understand this.
The full affidavit quoted in the tweet makes a lot of allegations, and most of them don't seem like the kind of thing that ought to be taken seriously (including a claim that cars that dropped off lunch must have been dropping off fake ballots because the witness did not see any lunch). The first allegation got my attention though because of the technical nature of it. The witness seems to be alleging that many ballot counters were not properly discarding batches of ballots before resubmitting them to the scanner after removing a problematic ballot, resulting in the batch being counted twice. In this case, "discard" does not seem to mean throwing out the ballots, but simply not submitting them to be counted and allowing them to be run back through the scanner.
Looking into this myself, I found the Michigan government website that includes information on which voting systems each county uses. We can see that in Wayne county, the tabulator was the "ImageCast Precinct". In order to understand how it is used, I found what I believe to be the user manual for this system here. On pages 26-28 you can find information about discarding batches.
This section in particular stood out to me because it seems to describe roughly the situation the witness is talking about, but it describes a different protocol than the one she says is normal. More specifically, it seems to recommend one that could easily be mistaken by an observer as double-counting the ballots. I will admit the writing is not super clear, but it seems to be saying that when you go through the output bin and remove the offending ballot, you are supposed to send all the ballots removed from the tray during your search back through, since the system will not have scanned them yet (it stopped when it detected a bad ballot). It does not instruct the user to discard the batch before rescanning the entire batch. Now this section of the manual is not describing a jam, but it is describing something very similar. CTRL+F'ing the manual doesn't show any results for "jam", though this section does talk about something "stopping" the machine, which is what jam does, so I figure it is the most applicable.
(edited the above paragraph because I realize I was misunderstanding something about the system. It makes more sense to me now)
This seems to cut against the allegation, but I am posting this here because I am not 100% sure I have found the correct manual, and don't have much knowledge of how voting machines work. Furthermore, the manual itself is confusingly written in my opinion. I actually can't tell if it's talking about putting only the ballots that haven't gone through the machine back through, or if it's talking about putting all the ones that already have back through. The text seems to imply that the user is taking things from the output tray and putting them back in the input tray, but that they are somehow "non-scanned" even though they have gone through and are now in the output tray. Perhaps when the system detects an error, it deletes the scans from its memory of all ballots in the batch, so they are now "non-scanned" despite being in the output tray. In any case, however, the batch is not to be discarded and scanning should continue.
I have only posted an except of what I consider the most relevant portion here, but I invite everyone to read pages 26-28, as well as any other parts they think may be important to better understand this.
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