Susan Voyles has worked as a poll manager for over 20 years. She told the Georgia Senate committee during a hearing Thursday about an “odd” batch of absentee ballots that caught her attention during the Georgia recount.
“Most of them were pretty worn, until we came up to a batch that is, it was, my words were ‘pristine.’ It was white, it was so white. And this is a typical absentee ballot. You can see how when it comes to you in the mail, how it’s got many folds in it. These had no folds,” said Voyles.
Voyles said what first struck her about these ballots was the feel of the paper. She said when you have counted and held ballots for as long as she has, you know the feel of them. And compared it to knowing the feel of a genuine verses a fake dollar bill.
“But the thing that really jumped out at us besides the feel of these ballots, besides there were no folds, was the fact that the first one that was bubbled in had almost a little eclipse of white in the bubble where you would bubble in,” said Voyles.
She noticed that the markings on the ballots all looked exactly the same, with the white eclipse around the filled-in marking. Voyels had also previously written in a sworn affidavit that 98 percent of the batch in question were for Joe Biden. The affidavit was included in Attorney Lin Wood’s lawsuit against the Georgia Secretary of State.
“What we began to notice was an overwhelming amount were exactly—not possibly—but exactly the same,” said Voyles
And in the middle of the stack, Voyles said they found a single ballot that appeared to have been pulled from a printer or copier too soon because the image wasn’t aligned properly on the paper.
A state lawmaker questioned Voyles on whether the pristine nature of the ballots could be explained by the duplication process.
“Couldn’t that be explained by the fact that they were all personally replicated and duplicated with observation by individuals working that same poll?” asked Georgia State Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat.
“The probability of that I would think is very slight. Because why would 98 ballots have that little white eclipse on the very first presidential ballot? Why would all of them be exactly the same? It was very easy to see that a ballot had been replicated many times,” Voyles replied.
She said it looked like the rest of the ballots were copies that had been marked by a printer or scanner. This could explain why the markings weren’t properly aligned, leaving the white eclipse inside the bubble.
