On June 5, 2012, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent 8,195,505 B2, “System, method and computer program for vote tabulation with an electronic audit trail.” The inventor line is John Poulos, James Hoover, Nick Ikonomakis, and Goran Obradovic. The current assignee listed on the Google Patents record is Dominion Voting Systems Corp. The application was filed May 5, 2005. Those names and that assignee are the primary facts.
The patent’s own abstract describes a ballot-processing device integrated with a ballot box: a paper feed, a computer, a ballot-processing application, and a digital scanner. The application, as claimed, processes a digital image of a paper ballot to define voting results and an audit trail, using criteria established by election officials. The specification discusses pixel-count thresholds for classifying a mark as a vote, a non-vote, or ambiguous, and a “vote stamp” appended to a stored ballot image. That is what the patent claims. It is not a finding that any particular election’s ballots were altered, flipped, or stolen.
Figure 6 in the specification is an example the inventors themselves used of a ballot image whose vote-stamp footer, in their illustration, “reflects processing results inconsistent with the voter intention.” The write-in example in that figure is a teaching illustration in a patent, not a report of a U.S. presidential count. This site does not treat a patent figure as a 2020 incident.