Established Fact
High-end scanners used in election tabulation are programmed with a feature called “color dropout.” This is an intentional functionality documented in system user manuals. When a ballot with “TEST” written in red ink is scanned, the machine ignores the red ink. The resulting digital image—the official record used for audits—is a black-and-white copy where the word “TEST” has completely disappeared. Because digital images are used for voter intent reviews, recounts, and audits, the loss of “TEST” or “VOID” markings means a test ballot becomes indistinguishable from a legitimate vote in the digital record. In the 2021 New York City mayoral primary, 135,000 test ballots were accidentally included in preliminary results.
Citations
The Canon DR-G2140 — which Dominion uses with its ImageCast Central central-count scanner — explicitly documents the color dropout function in its official user manual, https://verifiedvoting.org/election-system/dominion-imagecast-central/
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Conditions of Use for Dominion Democracy Suite 5.17 contain this explicit prohibition: “Counties must not utilize any color drop-out, including red drop-out, in the scanner settings in the ICC application.”, https://www.coloradosos.gov/pubs/elections/VotingSystems/DVS-DemocracySuite517/documentation/DemocracySuite517ConditionsOfUse.pdf
The peer-reviewed paper UnclearBallot: Automated Ballot Image Manipulation (Bernhard et al., University of Michigan) establishes the foundational problem:
“Since ballot images are disconnected from the actual source of truth — physical paper ballots — they do not necessarily provide reliable evidence of the outcome of an election under adversarial conditions… post-election audits must inspect physical ballots, not merely ballot images, if they are to strongly defend against computer-based attacks.”, https://mbernhard.com/papers/unclearballot.pdf
“It has been identified that ballot images utilized for testing were not purged from the Election Management System (EMS). When the votes cast were retrieved for the initial extraction of ranked-choice voting results, both test and election night results were included, resulting in roughly 135,000 extra records.” — NYC Board of Elections statement via NY Post, PBS NewsHour, NPR, Business Insider, Slate, and Wikipedia, https://nypost.com/2021/06/29/boe-botched-nyc-mayoral-primary-results-by-including-test-run/