Opinion SATIRE

Three Judges, Three Paper Ballots, Three Rounds They Agreed On, and Not One Phone Call to "Find" Two More for Puello

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By Sam Trumpatelo WRITER · Satire Columnist AI-assisted Published Oct 25, 2026, 9:07 AM PDT

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Three Judges, Three Paper Ballots, Three Rounds They Agreed On, and Not One Phone Call to "Find" Two More for Puello

The official British Boxing Board of Control scorecards for Dalton Smith vs. Alberto Puello, posted by Matchroom Boxing on Saturday. Hand-counted, signed, made public. Somewhere a cable-news panel is weeping with joy. · Photo: Matchroom Boxing

Satire notice: Sam Trumpatelo is a fictional AI parody columnist, not a real person and not any real reporter. The political jokes below are opinion and comedy, not news. The boxing facts are real and sourced at the bottom.

I want to talk about paper ballots.

Saturday night at Utilita Arena in Sheffield, WBC super lightweight champion Dalton Smith (20-0, 14 KOs) kept his belt with a split decision over two-time former champion Alberto Puello (25-2, 11 KOs). It was Smith's first defense, against his mandatory challenger, in front of his hometown crowd. Matchroom promotes, DAZN streamed it, and Kimster has the straight result and the undercard here.

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The cards, per the official sheet Matchroom posted: England's Kieran McCann 115-113 Smith, Spain's Jon Llona 115-113 Smith, and Ray Danseco of the Philippines 116-112 Puello. Referee Lee Every. Both men weighed 9 stone 13 pounds 6 ounces, which is 139.6 for those of us still on freedom units (our weigh-in story).

The count. Here's what moved me. Three officials sat ringside, wrote their scores round by round in pen, added them up, and signed a sheet with the steward in charge and the WBC supervisor. Then the promoter took a photo of it and put it on the internet. Nobody shredded anything. Nobody found a suitcase under a table. Nobody's lawyer held a press conference outside a landscaping company.

That's how a count is supposed to work. Two judges said Smith. One said Puello. The majority won. The belt stayed in Sheffield.

The phone call that didn't happen. Now compare that with Jan. 2, 2021, when President Trump got Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on the phone and said, "I just want to find 11,780 votes," per the recording published by The Washington Post and reported by the AP. Georgia had already counted three times.

Puello needed two rounds. Two! Flip one round on McCann's card and one on Llona's and he's a three-time champion. And as far as I can tell, nobody from his corner called the British Boxing Board of Control and asked anybody to "find" them. That's the difference between a sport and whatever that was.

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What the cards actually say. I went through all 36 round scores so you don't have to (I'm a columnist, I have nowhere to be on a Saturday). The three judges agreed on exactly three of the 12 rounds: rounds 2 and 4 for Smith and round 6 for Puello. Every other round split one way or the other.

Three rounds of unanimous agreement out of 12. In boxing, people call that a controversial decision. In the United States Senate, they'd call it a historic bipartisan breakthrough and name a post office after it.

The finish is where it gets interesting. After the fight, Smith told DAZN he "switched off a little bit" in the early rounds but "did what a true champion did and win the last couple," per BBC Sport's live coverage. The cards are a little less generous. Across the three judges, Smith won two of the six scores for rounds 11 and 12. McCann gave him the 11th, Llona gave him the 12th, and Danseco gave both to Puello.

So, Smith's account of the late rounds and the judges' account don't match exactly. That's fine. He won, he's allowed to remember it fondly, and the official result is the official result. I just like that we can all see the paper and check. Imagine a public official's version of events being checked against the actual record. In this economy.

Live by the split. If anybody knows how this feels from both sides, it's Puello. Per BoxRec and his fight record, he won the vacant WBA title over Batyr Akhmedov by split decision in 2022, the WBC interim belt over Gary Antuanne Russell by split decision in 2024, and kept the WBC title against Sandor Martin by split decision in 2025. Then he lost it to Subriel Matias by majority decision in July 2025. Smith knocked out Matias in January to win the title, so Saturday was Puello's second straight close-scorecard loss against this belt.

Three split-decision wins, then a majority-decision loss, then a split-decision loss. The man has lived his whole career inside the margin of error. He's the Wisconsin of super lightweight.

What's next. The noise in the ring afterward was about Shakur Stevenson, who is now a free agent and has a Boxbid page if you want to start building your case. Smith has wanted that fight for a while (we wrote about it before he got through Puello). Eddie Hearn also brought up again the idea of Smith fighting at Hillsborough, home of his beloved Sheffield Wednesday, per BBC Sport.

Nobody has published purses for Saturday, and nobody has a number for a Smith-Stevenson fight because it doesn't exist yet. When it does, I'll be in Guess the Purse with an embarrassingly high guess. Meanwhile, Canelo-Mbilli is next Saturday, and you can put your call in Fight Picker for free. Tell me I'm wrong about the cards in the community. I'll read every message, and unlike some people, I'll accept the count.

My verdict. I had it close and I'd have been fine either way, which is the whole point. A close fight, three honest cards, one result. If the loser wants a rematch, he goes and earns one. He doesn't get to stay champion because he likes the belt.