The Epoch Times Justin Mealey, a data scientist with the Data Integrity Group, told The Epoch Times on Jan. 5 that adjudication of 106,000 ballots on the election day in Fulton County, Georgia, is “physically not possible.”
Mealey worked in the U.S. Navy for 9 and a half years and was a former CIA contractor as a data analyst and programmer for the National Counterterrorism Center. He currently works for one of the “big four” accounting firms as a programmer.
Adjudication serves to resolve issues of voters marking ballots incorrectly, and the tabulating machine could not read it. A review panel will check the ballot, determine the voter’s “intent” and canvass it as such.
Richard Barron, director of elections of Fulton County, Georgia, said in a press conference on the evening of Nov. 4 that his team had already adjudicated 106,000 ballots out of 113,130 ballots scanned that day, and “those results are already posted.”
“When we talk to people who were adjudicators, we asked, what’s the fastest [time] you can adjudicate a ballot?” Mealey said in the interview with The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders.” “It’s about 30 seconds. It’s about the fastest you can adjudicate a ballot.”
“Then that’s basically two [ballots] per minute. And you’re saying 106,000. I think that’s like, you know, 53,000 ballots come out to about 883 man-hours to do that.”
“It’s physically impossible to adjudicate that many ballots one by one. Because they could have started their adjudication on November 3, and they would maybe get through about 58,000—today. So how could you do 106,000?” Mealey continued given the amount of time and the number of teams working on it.
“The adjudication process as allowed by Georgia law and election regulations provides for a bipartisan citizen panel to review any ballot within a batch that is flagged by the scanning software as not being clear about the voter’s intent,” said Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt, in a statement previously emailed to The Epoch Times.
She indicated that the number cited by Barron referred to a total number of ballots in batches that went to adjudication, but not every ballot in each batch was adjudicated.
Lynda McLaughlin, a member of the Data Integrity Group, pointed out another concern with Georgia’s adjudication process during the interview with “American Thought Leaders.”
“If you put a ballot in and it’s adjudicated, that original ballot with the voter’s original intent is gone,” Lynda said. “So now there’s a new ballot that you have that can be printed, and then they keep that as their record.”
“But that’s not how the voter voted. That’s how the adjudicator determined voter intent.”
Lynda indicated that’s why the results of the two recounts in Georgia could add up.
“There’re no audit logs. There’re no login credentials. The machine is already logged on. They don’t even have to log in. You don’t even know who made the change. There’s no tracking. This is our most important civic duty. And we have absolutely no receipt or record of what we’ve done,” Lynda added.
Lynda also pointed out that for the Jan. 5 run-off elections for U.S. Senate, Georgia “made zero changes to the way that they did the general election.”
The Data Integrity Group is a group of data scientists and machine learning experts analyzing the public data of the general election. The group discovered from the Georgia election data that more than 30,000 votes were removed from President Donald Trump, and another 12,173 votes were switched to President-elect Joe Biden.
The group testified about the results during the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Dec. 30.
“We have no comment on speculation by the Data Integrity Group, which appears to be based on an erroneous understanding of the absentee ballot process. We stand by our comments, and we retain all ballot information in compliance by law,” Regina Waller, a spokesperson from Fulton County, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Allen Zhong and Petr Svab contributed to this report.
