Maricopa County says printer glitches didn't prevent anyone from voting

[LetMyPeopleVote]

I have been an election judge several times (once I was the judge for the local GOP primary as a favor to the election administrator). Machines break. Arizona has county wide voting and there were several ways to protect their vote. My youngest child has been a judge a number of times and in 2014 she was at her polling place until 9 PM when the last voter in line voted. I came out from the election war room and stood in the back to mark the last voter in line at the time I got there.

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/27/maricopa-county-elections-printer-toner/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_source=twitter

Maricopa County, facing a storm of GOP criticism over its handling of the Nov. 8 election, said in a report issued Sunday that problems with printers that surfaced on Election Day did not violate the Arizona Constitution or other guidelines intended to ensure free and fair elections. The county instead blamed prominent Republicans for making their own supporters suspicious of a secure alternative allowing voters who encountered mechanical issues to cast ballots.

The report comes in response to a request from the Arizona attorney general’s office election integrity unit for an account of the Election Day problems before the county is set to certify its results on Monday. State certification is set for Dec. 5.

Tom Liddy, head of Maricopa County’s civil division and a lifelong Republican, wrote in a five-page letter accompanying the report that “all voters were still provided reasonable, lawful options for voting.” But some Republican voters might have spurned one option — a secure box known as “Door 3” — because GOP leaders, including the state party chair, told voters not to use it, according to the report......

The report notes that the problems affected a tiny fraction of voters, none of whom were disenfranchised because they were still able to deposit their ballots in the secure boxes, which have been used for decades. Ballots deposited in “Door 3” boxes accounted for 1 percent of total ballots issued to voters in the midterm elections, according to the county report.

Liddy writes that numerous counties in the state rely entirely on such a system, in which ballots are tabulated not at individual polling places but at a centralized site.

“It cannot be the case that the limited use of the Door 3 ballot box for some voters in Maricopa County violates the Constitution, while the required use of a ballot box by every voter in over half of the state’s counties does not,” he argues.

[Cha]

1. TY, LMPV.. & the Maricopa Co Report. nt