“Here,” he said, “you’ve got one set of eyes looking at all the ballots.”

Those eyes are blue. Sometimes, Ms. Fenumiai widens them. Sometimes, as she is assessing ballots challenged by observers for Mr. Miller, she pulls ballots close to her face and peers over her glasses.

The Miller observers might have seen misspellings  maybe a y for an i, maybe no w, maybe a c instead of a k. They might have seen a smear or a smudge or sometimes just loopy cursive that might  might  be subject to interpretation. The ballots also might seem perfect to many eyes.

A few moments pass, then the vast majority of the time, about 2,500 times so far, Ms. Fenumiai says clearly and a little loudly, “Murkowski.”

The observers are given a chance to look again. They almost always say “challenge.”

A few eyes might roll, but no one yells or screams. The ballot simply gets put into a special envelope  a growing stack that could become evidence in court.

“Some of them are very, very easy,” Ms. Fenumiai said. “Some of them are you know  can I phonetically get ‘Murkowski’ out of them?”