I’m happy to see that so many Americans came out to vote in this election. Record numbers cast their ballots for president.

But looking at the total votes cast is a little confusing in certain battleground states.

• Pennsylvania had 500,000 more votes than people registered.
• North Carolina had 500,000 more votes than people registered.
• Nevada had 150,000 more votes than people registered.
• Georgia had 100,000 more votes than people registered.

These voter statistics point to something more nefarious going on. Many are multiple standard deviations from recent presidential election totals.

Well reportedly there is a way to discover if all these ballots cast are authentic, according to the Department of Homeland Security officials.

DHS, which printed the ballots, embedded radioactive isotopes and watermarks onto the legal ballots. A quick scan can pick up the identifying features to validate the vote.

This could be a way to authenticate the 138,000 mysterious ballots that showed up in Michigan Wednesday morning after state officials called an end to the count and said it would resume later in the morning. In fact the counting started up again only an hour later with the addition of the new cache of votes.

So will DHS officials follow the watermark to verify the election results? It appears that is what will happen.

See Friday’s follow up story on watermarks here.