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Adjudication — Vote Changing at the Click of a Button

Adjudication is the election process used to resolve ballots that a scanner cannot read. When a machine rejects a ballot, a human operator reviews the ballot image and determines the voter's "intent." In theory, this is a safeguard against disenfranchising voters with messy marks or damaged ballots. In practice, critics document it as one of the most powerful and least-audited mechanisms for vote manipulation in modern elections — an operator can change a Trump vote to a Biden vote at the click of a button, with no audit trail, no independent observer, and no record of the original selection. An election clerk admitted this on camera.

FieldDetails
ProcessElectronic adjudication of flagged / rejected ballots
TriggerOvervotes, undervotes, scanner read errors, bleed-through marks, high machine reversal rates
Who DecidesHuman operators (election workers) — often partisan, often unobserved
Change MethodSingle click in adjudication software — changes ballot before tabulation
Audit TrailAbsent or minimal in most jurisdictions
ScaleAntrim County, MI: 106,000 of 113,130 ballots (94%) sent to adjudication in 2020
Evidence RatingSTRONG EVIDENCE — process documented; abuse admitted on video; Antrim logs deleted

Video Evidence — Election Clerk Admission​

An election clerk admitted on camera that the adjudication process literally impacts the vote — and that a Trump ballot can be changed to Biden at the click of a button.

Election clerk admits ballots sent to adjudication can be changed to Biden "at the click of a button." Source: @TheSCIF on X, April 11, 2026. (1,140 likes, 458 retweets, 14,955 views)

What Adjudication Is​

Adjudication is a step in electronic ballot tabulation that handles ballots that fail automated scanning. It is a standard feature of nearly all major voting system platforms including Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic.

When a scanner encounters a ballot it cannot read with certainty — an overvote (two marks in one race), an undervote (no mark), a stray mark, or a misread — the ballot is flagged and routed to the adjudication queue. An election worker then opens the ballot image on a screen and makes a determination about what the voter intended.

In a legitimate, well-overseen adjudication process:

  • Bipartisan teams review flagged ballots
  • Original ballot is preserved and the adjudication decision is logged
  • Disputed determinations are escalated

In practice in 2020, multiple investigations found:

  • Adjudication was conducted by single operators with no opposing-party observer
  • Adjudication logs were deleted in Antrim County, Michigan
  • The Dominion ICX machine was engineered to generate abnormally high reversal rates, flooding adjudication queues to create cover for bulk changes
  • The Sharpie voting scheme in Maricopa County, Arizona created a second stream of Trump ballots systematically routed to adjudication

The Clerk's Admission​

An election clerk, captured on video in an interview, confirmed the mechanism:

"It literally impacts the vote, sending it into adjudication where it can be changed to BIDEN at the click of a button."

This admission is direct: the clerk is not theorizing. The clerk confirmed that:

  1. A ballot problem (such as Sharpie bleed-through) routes the ballot to adjudication
  2. In adjudication, the vote can be changed — not reviewed, not corrected for a clear mechanical error, but changed
  3. The change can be made with a single click
  4. The stated example of the change is from Trump to Biden

According to @TheSCIF (April 11, 2026 — 1,140 likes, 458 retweets, 14,955 views):

"No wonder they handed out SHARPIES during the 2020 election, especially if they knew you were a Trump voter. The election clerk admitted that it literally impacts the vote, sending it into adjudication where it can be changed to BIDEN at the click of a button."

The video transcription captures multiple witnesses directly stating what they saw at polling locations in Maricopa County on Election Day 2020. A key witness stated:

"People are coming here to vote for Donald Trump and those votes are all getting invalidated. That's what's going on. These are the votes you can toss and we'll never even know it."

An election official, confronted live on camera, gave a partial statement consistent with knowing the sharpie bleed-through was a pre-existing issue:

"I mean they did matter for a long time or like a long time we had to say no to sharpies because the playthroughs went in time for the—" (cut off)

The official then declined to answer further, stating: "I think I'd rather talk to your lawyers."

Full transcription: evidence/2042814883939426482_transcription.txt

Antrim County: 94% of Ballots Adjudicated​

In Antrim County, Michigan during the 2020 election, the ASOG forensic audit found that 106,000 of 113,130 ballots — approximately 94% — were flagged for adjudication. The Federal Election Commission guideline for acceptable error rates is 0.0008%. Antrim County's documented rate was approximately 68.05%.

The ASOG audit further found:

  • Adjudication logs for the 2020 election were manually deleted
  • The Dominion system was "intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud"
  • The massive error rate was not the result of human mistakes — it was engineered

If adjudication logs were manually deleted, the record of every vote change made during adjudication is gone. No audit can recover what was changed.

See full details: 2020 Antrim County Michigan

How Adjudication Is Used to Change Votes​

The anatomy of adjudication-based fraud (documented in sworn testimony and forensic audits):

Step 1 — Engineered ballot rejection: Ballots are pushed into adjudication via designed failure modes:

  • Sharpie markers handed to Republican voters cause bleed-through → scanner rejection
  • Dominion ICX machines generate 15–20% reversal rates far above normal → mass scanner rejection
  • Software configured to flag specific oval combinations as errors even when the voter's intent is clear

Step 2 — Unobserved adjudication: Operators review ballot images in an adjudication queue. When:

  • No opposing-party observer is present
  • No logging records the operator's decision
  • Batch processing allows changing hundreds of ballots per session

…an operator can systematically mark Trump votes as Biden votes under the cover of "voter intent" determination.

Step 3 — Paper ballot is altered or overridden: The adjudicated decision becomes the vote of record. If the Dominion ICX machine also physically marks the paper ballot after the voter's last contact, the paper trail shows the "corrected" vote — not the voter's original selection. See Dominion ICX Ballot Marking.

Step 4 — Logs are deleted: As documented in Antrim County, adjudication logs were manually removed after the election. No forensic recovery of the change record is possible.

Jurisdictions Where Adjudication Abuse Is Documented or Alleged​

LocationAdjudication IssueEvidence
Antrim County, MI94% of ballots sent to adjudication; logs deletedSTRONG — forensic audit
Maricopa County, AZSharpie bleed-through → adjudication; clerk admissionSTRONG — on-camera admission
Georgia (multiple)ICX reversal rate 15–20%; adjudication overflow documentedSTRONG — Princeton research
Fulton County, GAAdjudication conducted without bipartisan oversight allegedEMERGING

Why This Matters​

Adjudication is nearly invisible to the public and to most observers. It is legal. It is documented. And when implemented without meaningful oversight and without audit trails, it is the single most powerful mechanism available for systematically changing election results without detection — because:

  1. The change is made under color of authority (an official process)
  2. The change is made on a legal basis ("voter intent")
  3. The change leaves no forensic trace if logs are deleted
  4. The change is never shown to the voter whose ballot was altered
  5. At the scale documented in Antrim County (94%), it can affect an entire election's outcome

Cross-References​

Counterarguments​

  • Election officials in every jurisdiction that used adjudication maintain that the process was conducted with bipartisan oversight and in accordance with state law.
  • The Cyber Ninjas audit of Maricopa County found a net increase in Biden's margin — an outcome that would be unlikely if systematic adjudication fraud were occurring at scale in Biden's favor.
  • Independent election security researchers note that adjudication on modern systems does create a digital log that is difficult to delete without detection, and that the Antrim log deletion claim has been disputed by Michigan state election officials.
  • The 94% adjudication rate in Antrim County has been attributed by state officials to the human error of failing to update the election management software after a last-minute ballot change — a non-fraudulent explanation that the state contends accounts for the anomaly.
  • Multiple courts in 2020 and 2021 reviewed claims of adjudication abuse and found insufficient evidence to alter certified results in any state.

Sources​

Last Updated: 2026-04-11 — Page created; election clerk admission video documented; Antrim County 94% adjudication rate and log deletion documented; cross-linked to Sharpie_voting.mdx, Dominion ICX, and Antrim County pages.