AZ: Maricopa County says it had no way to know its ballot printers would fail.

[RandySF]

One big question Maricopa County voters had after many had trouble casting ballots at polling places in November’s election was whether county leaders should have seen the problem coming.

The county continues to insist that there’s no way it should have known certain ballot printers would fail during Election Day voting. But the company that made those printers, OKI, argues that its printer manual was clear that these retail-grade printers were not cut out for the job Maricopa subjected them to — and the county should have contacted the company ahead of time to check.

In an internal report released to Votebeat on Wednesday, the county’s election officials again maintain they had no indication the printers would struggle to print on the thicker ballot paper used in November. They wrote in the 16-page report that the problems didn’t show up in pre-election testing or during early voting, and the manual for the printers gave “conflicting information” about which types of paper the printers could handle.

The OKI printers that failed were inexpensive printers that the county and its supplier, Runbeck Election Services, had retrofitted. The printers were originally used to print ballot envelopes, then altered by adding longer trays to accommodate 20-inch, 100-pound cardstock ballots.

OKI says its manual for the printers is clear that you can’t use them to print double-sided on such thick paper, according to two letters the company recently sent to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Votebeat reported as much in December after speaking to numerous election technology experts about what caused the faint and flaking toner that the on-site ballot tabulators then could not read.



https://www.azmirror.com/2023/07/31/maricopa-county-says-it-had-no-way-to-know-its-ballot-printers-would-fail/

[EYESORE 9001]

1. Weaponized incompetence

[jimfields33]

2. I'd say there was some negligence going on in the county

Charges should be brought to those responsible. This seems very deliberate. Saving money is no excuse for using printers not equipped for the task. How many voters were screwed either through leaving for time restraints or the ballot didn’t print out?

[Hugh_Lebowski]

5. Ballots printed, everyone got to vote save for perhaps a small % of time-constrained folks

Problem wasn't printing ballots as such, problem was the tabulators struggled to read many of them as the ballot printing wasn't to spec per the tabulator, so that slowed things down as they couldn't be counted on the spot. The ballots were made available, and were all eventually counted however.

This is exactly the kind of thing one might expect to NOT see in testing, but happens when the machines are being pushed to their limit on election day itself. A proper amount of 'stress testing' was not done. Very easy mistake to make esp. if you don't have unlimited budget.

But given that Maricopa went fairly solidly Dem, statistically it's likely that those that left because of time would've voted in larger numbers for Democratic candidates, as numbers of such cases would most likely break down fairly evenly.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. Sounds like a budget issue plus an accidental 'miss' of the fact that the cheap printers

were not quite up to the task when put to the test on election day.

Everyone still got to vote, that's the most important part of the equation. There were backup plans, and they worked.

[TheRealNorth]

4. +1

Most likely this. When you try to do stuff in the cheap, this stuff happens. Especially if they had turnover after 2020 and the newer people don't have as much experience on what can go wrong.