This isn’t rocket-science. Elections have been conducted for centuries, and there are policies and procedures that are to be followed, not the least of which is securing and accounting for official ballots.
There is a total number of ballots produced. They are distributed - some to satisfy absentee requests, some to satisfy mail-in requests, some to fill the needs of same-day registration and early voting. But every one of those ballots should be accounted for. They should know immediately how many were mailed out, and what those ballot numbers were. By checking the ballot numbers on the mailers returned, they should immediately be able to tell you how many were returned, and which ones. It follows that they can also tell you which ones were NOT returned. The same goes for those distributed to the early voting sites. It should be a simple matter to determine which of the ballots counted were products of the early-voting process.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but I’ll do so anyway: to ensure there are enough ballots to conduct the election, there should be more ballots on-hand than will actually be required or used. That’s to ensure you don’t run out. Those too should be accounted for.
It takes a willing suspension of common sense to believe they don’t have these processes in place, and can’t immediately cite the numbers, chapter and verse. The only ballots that should not be accounted for at the end of an election are those mailed out to fulfill absentee and other vote-by-mail requests, and that are not returned. The rest should be one of: unused/undistributed; spoiled; voted. Of the voted, it should be trivial to categorize as mail-in, in-person early, in-person at precinct, and even provisional.
Dear BF,
You are a genius! Please forward your explanation to CNN.
To be honest, I wish those gentlemen from the hearing would have explained something like you just did.
I knew that 74K ballots with a problem existed, but I couldn’t connect it, specifically, to the problem.
How dumb am I?
And yet here we are. They create confusion where there should not be.
From the CNN story, it sounds as if the election official is explaining (in a rather condescending manner) that the Dem placeholder ballots should be counted as the real official ballots, and that there is nothing wrong with that.