To me, there were four truly remarkable features of the Maricopa report Rick blogged here.

• First is how thorough, matter-of-fact, and by-the-books the report seems to be.  The overwhelming feel from the report is that It’s not a crazy-train hunt for conspiracy, but an actual attempt, using careful and replicable testing with transparent description of methodology, to try to figure out what went wrong.  This is the way that normal postmortems look when they’re run by professionals trying to get real answers.  And amid all of the preference for spectacularly abnormal and abnormally spectacular “forensic investigations,” it’s nice to be able to highlight one that’s a case study in ordinary.
  
• Second is how mundane the problem seemed to be: printers at the edge of their capacity, working on paper that’s just slightly too heavy and too long, meant that a few too many didn’t print as intended.  Election officials compensated in real time as best they could, but this is the sort of minutiae that election officials constantly have to deal with — and the rest of the report is a testament to all of the other testing that was done before the election to try to spot other problems in advance.  It’s just that nobody notices when the printers all work.  (And in any other office, a problem with the copiers wouldn’t be reason for anyone to scream malfeasance.)
  
• Third is how the conspiracy beast feeds itself.  The reason that the paper was too heavy in 2022 is because of #Sharpiegate: on p. 9-10, the report notes that ballot-marking pens occasionally bled through lighter paper in 2020, and though that bleed-through didn’t affect any votes, it launched a viral wave of conspiracy.  Officials acting in good faith to try to address that one problem unwittingly gave rise to more grist for the conspiracy machine (and again, the ballots subject to the printer error in 2022 could all be counted: it was only a question of tabulation on-site or centrally).
  
• Fourth is the (everpresent) connection to the lingering infrastructure funding issue I’ve been obsessed with.  The printers seemed to work just fine on lighter paper or with shorter ballots.  For now.  But the equipment manufacturer (p. 24) has withdrawn from North American markets, with “December 31, 2025 as the end of life for these printers, after which repair parts and consumables will no longer be manufactured.”  Maricopa (and other jurisdictions using these printers) will have to replace the equipment sooner rather than later, whether the ballots are lighter and shorter or not.  That takes reliable funding streams, which should be at the top of every legislative menu.