Several major failures have been identified during the 2022 election in Arizona’s Maricopa County, a new report has revealed.
Maricopa County has published a report regarding the failures as lawsuits continue against Arizona election officials.
2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem have both filed motions for reconsideration in their respective races
On Monday, Maricopa County released a report by former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor on the causes of the ballot printer issues on Election Day.
The issues occurred at more than 70 vote centers on Election Day last year and caused long lines as many voters’ ballots were unreadable by tabulator machines.
Many voters argued that they were unable to vote in person due to the problems they encountered at voting stations.
Republican voters favor in-person voting while mail-in ballots are mostly used by Democrats.
According to the report, the county expanded the length of the ballots from 19 inches during the primary election to 20 inches in the general election in order to include all of the required information.
The increased ballot size in combination with the use of 100-pound ballot paper, the report concludes, was too great a strain on some older printers that were used.
Regarding the issue of ballots being printed for 19-inch paper rather than 20-inch, the report concluded that “ballots were re-sized as ‘fit to page,’ a process that entirely changed the location of the timing marks on the ballots and assured that neither the on-site tabulators nor the central count tabulators could read the ballots.”
It couldn’t be determined whether the reason for this change was “from a technician attempting to correct the printing issues … or a problem internal to the printers,” according to the report.
However, during the investigators’ “testing, four printers randomly printed one or a few ‘fit to page’ ballots in the middle of printing a batch of ballots.
“None of the technical people with whom we spoke could explain how or why that error occurred.”
In response to the report, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Clint Hickman said: “Now that we have a better idea of the factors involved, we’ll make changes to best serve voters, starting with replacing some equipment.”
These and other failures that marred the November election prompted Lake’s election lawsuit, which she originally filed in December.
Lake, the Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee, fell about 17,000 votes short in the 2022 election.
She is suing current Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and Maricopa County election officials and is requesting that the election results be invalidated or that she be declared the winner.
Lake’s case was reviewed by the Arizona Supreme Court, which remanded one of her seven counts to the trial court and allowed sanctions against her to be considered.
Maricopa County Superior Court is supposed to rehear Lake’s count on Maricopa County’s alleged violations of its signature verification practices but is waiting on the high court to determine if she must pay sanctions to Hobbs and Fontes regarding her claim of 35,563 unaccounted early ballots being added to Maricopa County’s final tally.
On Wednesday, Lake’s lawyers filed her opposition to sanctions with the Arizona Supreme Court and a motion to reconsider hearing the count regarding the 35,563 unaccounted early ballots.
“We took the sanctions briefing ordered by the [Arizona Supreme Court] and flipped it into a request for reconsideration of the 35K ballot injection issue at Runbeck,” Lake told The Arizona Sun Times regarding the filing.
In Lake’s lawsuit, she had claimed there were 35,563 early ballots added to the total number of ballots scanned at Runbeck Election Services.
However, the high court found that the “record does not reflect that 35,563 unaccounted ballots were added to the total count.”
In Lake’s new motion, her lawyers note that while “the number of early ballots recorded on the Runbeck Receipt of Delivery forms dated November 8-9, 2022, totaled 263,379 ballots,” there were “298,942 Election Day early ballots recorded on the Runbeck Scan Receipts, that is a discrepancy of 35,563 more ballots scanned than ballots received.”
