The combination of heavier paper and longer ballots was responsible for problems tabulating votes at dozens of polling places in Maricopa County, Ariz., during last November’s midterm elections, according to a report released Monday.
The report was prepared by a former chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, Ruth McGregor, who was tapped by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to conduct an independent review of why some of the Oki B432 printers that had performed effectively during an earlier August primary then malfunctioned several months later. McGregor retained election experts for her months-long probe.
McGregor emphasized in an introduction to the nearly 40-page document that her review was “independent and free of any outside influence.”
The report was discussed privately at a meeting on Monday of Maricopa County’s Republican-led governing body, the board of supervisors. Its public release marks the latest chapter in the board’s quest to tamp down conspiracy theories about elections in the county, which is home to more than half the state’s voters.
The printer problems caused confusion on Election Day, as tabulators at the affected sites rejected faulty ballots. Voters were instructed to travel to another polling place or deposit their ballots in secure drawers that were later transported to a central tabulation site in downtown Phoenix.
The report stressed that problems with the printers, though they inconvenienced some voters and gained widespread attention, were not pervasive. “Two-thirds of the general election vote centers reported no issues with misprinted ballots; approximately 94 percent of election day ballots were not faulty,” McGregor wrote.
Still, the glitches fueled allegations from high-profile GOP candidates that the county had deliberately undermined in-person voting, which is favored by many Republicans. Kari Lake, the unsuccessful GOP candidate for governor who has still not conceded her race, has promoted baseless claims on social media that the county had acted “fraudulently,” adding the rallying cry “#Sabotage.” Republican Abraham Hamadeh, who lost his race for attorney general in one of the closest contests in state history, called the malfunctions a “direct attack on democracy.”
But the review found no evidence of malfeasance by county officials or contractors. Instead, decisions by election officials to use heavier and longer paper for ballots forced printers to “perform at the extreme edge of their capability, a level that could not be reliably sustained” by a large number of machines, according to the report. The heavier paper was used because of conspiracy theories about ink soaking through the paper used in previous contests, the report noted. The longer paper, it said, was used because the numerous contests up for grabs in the midterms could not fit on the typical 19-inch ballot.
You can find the report at this link.