Washington (CNN) Ballots continue to be counted in several battleground states, and some of them are receiving extra scrutiny in a process known as ballot adjudication. Though the intricacies of the process vary state by state, it typically involves a small panel of people reviewing a ballot to determine either the voter's intent or whether the ballot can be counted at all based on whether the voter was eligible to cast it. "The whole point of this process is to deal with those ballots where it's uncertain either whether the person is eligible to vote or how that person has made a choice," said Rick Hasen, a CNN contributor and election law expert at the University of California, Irvine. The process could be used in the counting of provisional ballots, which are cast when there's a question about a voter's eligibility, or to count ballots that, for example, might have gotten "physically mangled in the process of trying to put them through a scanning machine," according to Hasen. "When these kinds of garden-variety problems arise, election boards or other bodies have to decide how to treat those ballots," he said.

Source: CNN November 05, 2020 20:37 UTC