Real or fake?

At City Lights, Ed Kemmick makes a good point in his own comments section:

In regard to smudges, erasures, cross-outs, etc., isn’t that the whole point of instructing voters who have marred their ballots to request a new one? If you fill in one oval and someone tries to tamper with that, it is immediately apparent. But if a poll worker, election office employee or anyone else with access wants to tamper with a ballot – by cross-outs, erasures, smudges, etc. – whose [sic] to say who made those marks?

I didn't mention this before, but five of the seven disputed ballots had been marked in exactly the same way: Ovals for Cross and Jore were both completely filled in, and an X was marked on Cross' name. None of the five ballots had been changed in any other way. Of the other two ballots, one had a squiggly line through Cross' name, and the other is the one I reproduced below. I'm not saying anybody tampered with the ballots, but it did strike me as odd that they all were changed in precisely the same way. Even the X's were all about the same size.

In a column on this topic, Sen. Joe Balyeat calls the Supreme Court decision "pure sophistry and a farce," and he points out that that some votes the Democratic candidate also contained multiple markings. That's true: One ballot marked both Windham and the box for a write-in candidate, then failed to write a name in the spot for a write-in. Another marked the boxes both for Windham and a write-in, then wrote Windham in as a write-in. The same voter did that in several other races, too.

Balyeat's column also makes an odd presumption. He says that on all seven disputed ballots, voters "first filled in the oval next to the Republican, but then crossed it out and filled in the oval next to the Constitution candidate." I don't see how he could possibly know which oval was filled in first.