The liaison between Senate Republicans who authorized the audit and county officials told a hearing Tuesday that serial numbers were missing on damaged ballots that were duplicated so they could be read by vote tabulation machines.
Former Secretary of State Ken Bennett’s team uncovered the error just a few days ago, he told Senate President Karen Fann and Judicial Committee Chair Warren Petersen. Each damaged ballot and its associated duplicate ballot are supposed to have the same serial number to ensure they are only counted once.
But he has found many batches of damaged ballots without the serial numbers that are on the duplicates, violating state law. “We are struggling as to how we’re going to be able to match up” those damaged and duplicated ballots, Bennett said.
As long as they still have the damaged ballots segregated from the rest of the ballots they could re-adjudicate them and compare their totals with the totals from the duplicates. If there is a large discrepancy between the results, that would be enough to indicate fraud, even if they’re unable to tie individual damaged ballots with their respective duplicates.