AP removed "invalid" awards ballot, after the fact

NBC Sports

2 days ago

The Associated Press issued the various 2024 NFL regular-season awards during Super Bowl week. Fifty media members vote on the awards.
At some point after the awards were announced, one of the 50 ballots was dumped.
'AP removed an invalid ballot that was inadvertently included in its NFL Awards tabulation and adjusted its point totals to reflect 49 voters instead of 50,' an Associated Press spokesperson told PFT via email. 'The correction does not impact the winners or the list of finalists distributed by AP, and the change to the vote total was communicated to AP customers and readers.'
It definitely wasn't communicated to the voters. I tripped over it on Wednesday while writing up a blurb about running back J.K. Dobbins visiting the Broncos. In an effort to refresh my memory as to where he finished in the comeback player of the year voting, I found the official AP article.
At the bottom is this undated update: 'This story has been corrected to remove an invalid ballot that was inadvertently included in the tabulation. The AP has adjusted its point totals to reflect 49 voters instead of 50. This correction does not impact the winners or the list of finalists distributed by AP.'
So we started digging. And here's what happened.
During the tabulation of the 50 ballots, the ballot submitted by Diantee Lee of TheRinger.com was counted twice, with the second ballot replacing the ballot assigned to Hall of Fame head coach and Football Night in America analyst Tony Dungy. After the AP noticed the error (which explains why Lee's and Dungy's ballots as released by the AP were identical), Dungy's ballot was removed.
Dungy noticed the mistake because the ballots as disclosed by the AP incorrectly showed that he voted for Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson for MVP. The AP then told him a couple of weeks later that it did not use his ballot at all.
We'd hoped for a more thorough and transparent explanation from the AP as to how this happened. The awards are very important, especially since legal wagers are now placed on them. Any mistake should be fully and completely acknowledged and explained.
For now, it's unclear why Dungy's ballot was simply rejected instead of replaced. It's possible that simply removing the second Diante Lee ballot changed nothing, but that removing it and replacing it with Dungy's actual ballot may have altered one or more of the outcomes, either as to the winner, the second-place finisher, and so on.