The Tokyo 2020 Paralympics organizing committee announced Friday that the original selection process for the Games logo was rigged, but had no effect on the winning logo by Kenjiro Sano that had to be scrapped over plagiarism allegations.

An investigation by a third-party panel reported that the first round of the original selection process was fixed. As a result, the submissions of the eight designers who were invited to the competition were automatically selected for the second round.

The report claimed that Takuma Takasaki, of the organizing committee's financial planning office, and Hidetoshi Maki, head of the marketing office, lobbied Kazumasa Nagai, head of the judging committee, to get votes for two submissions that lacked enough support.

Both works, however, were eliminated from contention in the second round.

No irregularities were discovered in the process after the rigged first round, and investigators found the rigged vote had no bearing on the selection of Sano's design — which was eventually abandoned.