To clarify, the allegation is that the duplication process created a blank write in, which caused the vote to be invalidated.
From AZCentral:
It is a bit odd. They are rather vague on what happened. The motion for continued inspection reporting on the findings on the 100 ballots and asking to now review 2,500 ballots says:
A second ballot was also identified on which the original ballot was clearly a vote only
for Trump, but the duplicate ballot had a vote for both Trump and a “blank” write-in candidate,
causing the “Trump” vote to be cancelled (due to an “over-vote”).
That could mean that the election worker incorrectly wrote the "blank" on the write-in line. But it doesn't say that. It only says it was "clearly a vote only
for Trump". That makes it sound like the voter wrote the word "blank" on the write-in line and that got copied to the duplicated ballot and that is something that would cause the machine to record it as a overvote even though there clearly was not actually a write-candidate.
I'm not sure how that works in Arizona. In other state an overvote from a write-in would require that the ballot be manually reviewed to determine whether there is actually a write-in and not just some markings like a line or "x" or something by the voter to indicate no write-in candidate.
There were no errors found in the review of 100 mail-in ballots. A team of handwriting experts reviewed the signatures for those ballots. No fraudulent signatures were found. There were 8-10% that were inconclusive because they did not have the number of required sample signatures available to meet the standards for expert handwriting analysis. But of all the signatures that could be reviewed, there were no errors found.
That is 2 errors out of 100 duplicated ballots reviewed. There were no other errors (at least as it affected any votes for Trump or Biden). One was a switch to Biden from Trump, which would diminished Biden's lead by 2 votes. And one vote for Trump not counted which would diminished Biden's lead by 1 vote. That decreases Biden's lead by 3 votes.
Arizona has not released the total number of duplicated ballots, but there are reports of an estimate of 28,000. If the error rate of the initial review remains constant in a review of all of those ballots, it would decrease Biden's lead by 840 votes leaving a lead of 9,617.
