PHOENIX — Maricopa County supervisors are bringing in a former state Supreme Court docket chief justice to determine what went mistaken with poll printers on Election Day.
The announcement Friday got here as failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake continued to insist that the issues that saved tabulators from studying the ballots was an intentional act designed to suppress Republican votes and deny her the election.
Lake has produced no precise proof of tampering with the printers, a lot much less who was concerned.
As a substitute, Lake has been counting on the testimony of Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity skilled, who opined that the issue with some printers, particularly spitting out undersized photos, should have been achieved deliberately.
In a joint assertion, supervisors Chairman Invoice Gates and Vice Chairman Clint Hickman make no reference to Lake’s allegations. Whereas these claims have been dismissed by a trial choose, she is now taking her case to the state Court docket of Appeals.
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As a substitute, they mentioned the choice to hunt evaluate by Ruth McGregor was merely a part of the board’s dedication “to steady enchancment.”
“When issues don’t work, we discover out why,” the pair mentioned.
“Justice McGregor will rent a group of impartial specialists to search out out why the printers that learn ballots within the August main had bother studying some ballots whereas utilizing the identical settings within the November basic election” they wrote. “Our voters deserve nothing much less.”
The difficulty belongs to the supervisors as a result of they’re accountable for Election Day voting. The county recorder handles early ballots.
No particular deadline was disclosed for the report.
The difficulty arose as a result of Maricopa County makes use of a system of vote facilities, permitting residents to forged a poll at any of 223 places somewhat than must go to the native precinct.
That, in flip, requires there be “poll on demand” printers, which, supplied with every individual’s info, prints out a poll particular to that voter, with solely the races on which she or he can select.
Maricopa’s system additionally makes use of on-site tabulators, permitting voters to instantly feed these on-demand ballots into the machine to be tallied. However at quite a lot of websites the printers refused to learn the ballots.
What additionally was subsequently found is that some printers have been set to a “match to web page’’ format, leading to 19-inch ballots being printed on the usual 20-inch paper. And because the tabulators have been programmed for 20-inch ballots they may not correctly rely them.
Much less clear is whether or not that was the foundation trigger.
There was testimony throughout Lake’s first trial that officers at some places, discovering issues studying the ballots, reset the printer settings ensuing within the 19-inch output.
There additionally was testimony by a short lived technical employee for the county that issues with printers might be solved by a number of means, together with taking out and shaking the printer cartridges, cleansing the corona wire that helps transfer the toner from the drum to the paper, letting the printers heat up, and adjusting the settings. And the choose who threw out Lake’s prices mentioned that, aside from the final, none of these recommend an intent to provide a picture unreadable to the on-site tabulators.
The choose, in rejecting claims that the problems have been created with the intent of altering the end result, additionally famous that anybody whose poll couldn’t be instantly learn by the tabulator might place it right into a sealed field to be counted later at a central location.
This isn’t McGregor’s first foray into impartial investigations.
In 2019, she and Rebecca White Berch, one other retired chief justice led an inquiry into defective locks within the state jail system. That resulted in a scathing report about how Charles Ryan, then the company director, remained “surprisingly uninformed’’ about nonfunctioning locks at one of many state’s largest prisons that end in “inmates streaming from cells to assault correctional officers and different inmates.’’
The evaluation discovered there was a “informal perspective of the inmates who go away their cells, wander the unit, and enter different cells.’’ Extra vital, they mentioned, have been assaults on corrections officers on the Lewis Jail in Buckeye.
However the justices mentioned they may not positively say that Ryan knew concerning the issues — a minimum of not till he seen movies that, by that point, had been aired on tv.
See how election ballots are sorted, secured, processed and counted in Pima County after you vote.
Howard Fischer is a veteran journalist who has been reporting since 1970 and protecting state politics and the Legislature since 1982. Observe him on Twitter at @azcapmedia or e mail [email protected].