The 2024 election has already been certified, but a video of an Orange County elections worker seemingly scanning a batch of ballots multiple times has popped up on social media and partisan blogs in recent days.
“We don’t know if there is a legitimate reason for the worker’s actions,” a post on conservative radio host Joe Hoft’s website said.
The answer is yes, according to Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page, who reviewed the footage and related documents.
“The video shows an Orange County election worker scanning a batch of ballots three times during the 2024 presidential general election,” Page said. “However, the employee only saved the batch of ballots once. Therefore, the votes were only included in the results once.”
Page pointed out that it was only after the third time the ballots were scanned that a batch report was printed from the nearby printer on the worker’s desk, which she then attached to the batch of ballots. Since the report did not print the first two times, those scanned ballots were not saved.
“She likely scanned the batch of ballots twice and then cleaned the scanner before scanning the batch of ballots a third time because during the first two scans some of the ballots were rejected by the scanner,” Page said. “Given the large number of vote-by-mail ballots we must scan during an election, we must regularly clean the scanners.”
The registrar also noted that his office undergoes multiple audits and quality checks to ensure ballots are only counted once — and accurately.
That includes other Orange County election workers who “quality checked” that batch of ballots two more times, ensuring the information on the attached report is accurate. Ballots are not included in the counted tally until those reviews are complete, according to Page.
The Jan. 16 post on Hoft’s website doesn’t include Page’s comments in the article. (Page did post statements in the comments section of the post.)
An account on X called “End Wokeness” also shared the clip on Jan. 16, alleging that a poll worker was “caught triple scanning” ballots on Nov. 8. That video had 2.2 million views as of Monday morning, Jan. 20, with no further context.
A Jan. 17 post on the right-wing Gateway Pundit blog does include Page’s explanation. Still, the post seemingly insinuated a nefarious action by the poll worker, calling the video “a troubling incident” and “a bombshell revelation” that “raised serious questions about the ballot counting procedures in Orange County, California.”
The Republican Party of Orange County shared Page’s assessment of the worker’s actions in a post on social media, saying, “We will continue to review, but wanted to ensure that we daylighted this information.”
More than 1.4 million voters cast ballots in Orange County in the 2024 general election, 64.33% of those eligible to vote in the county.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris beat President Donald Trump in Orange County, with 49.72% of votes. But Republican Steve Garvey beat now-Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, in the race for the open U.S. Senate seat.
The Gateway Pundit, founded by Joe Hoft’s brother Jim Hoft, was sued by two Georgia election workers, alleging defamation, after the 2020 election. The Missouri-based outlet and the two workers reached a settlement in October, the terms of which were not disclosed.
According to The Associated Press, nearly 70 articles that were cited as defamatory were stripped from the Gateway Pundit’s website.
The two workers gave emotional and powerful testimony in 2022 to the congressional committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, told the committee they had received death threats and lost their sense of security because of false claims they were involved in election fraud.
They also sued One America News Network and former Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani over false allegations of election fraud that they said made them fearful for their lives and livelihoods. The former New York City mayor was ordered to pay $148 million in damages in the defamation case.
Leave a Reply