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Home » Maricopa County has issues again

Maricopa County has issues again

The New Neo Posted on by

In Maricopa they say “trust us,” but do little to earn that trust. Au contraire.

And trust must be earned.

For example:

Arizona’s Maricopa County is the state’s most populated county. Polling places had printer machine problems the second they opened.

A few problems include running out of ballots and machines printing illegible ballots…

The Republican Party and the campaigns for Republican governor candidate Kari Lake and Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters accused county officials of incompetence. All three sued the county “over issues with the voting tabulation machines.”

Maricopa County officials assured everyone they would count everyone’s ballot and no one would be disenfranchised. They also claim no one turned away voters on Tuesday.

The Republicans tried to expand poll hours, but a judge said no way.

That’s odd because other places with machine issues stayed open later.

You may recall that Maricopa had issues, although different ones, in 2020. Also, that Maricopa is a red county. The people locally in charge overall in the county are Republicans, but in the past they’ve acted very strangely when challenged and have defended themselves rather than much else. And I’m pretty sure that not everyone with access to machines is a Republican.

You may also recall that this year, gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs is the Arizona Secretary of State and in charge of voting integrity, but did not recuse herself:

“We’ve seen this time and time again,” Lake said in a news conference at the Mexican border. “She’s running her office with a great incompetency and maybe maladministration. The ethical thing would be for her to recuse yourself. I don’t think she’s going to do it. And that’s a problem.”

Lake also noted that 6,000 Arizona voters erroneously received mail-in ballots that only featured federal races as she was trying to paint Hobbs as incompetent.

Hobbs, who has faced calls to recuse herself and to resign from her post as secretary of state to ensure a fair and free election, refuses to do it.

Hobbs told the media over the weekend that she will do what she was elected to do in 2018.

“I took an oath of office to do the job that voters elected me to do,” Hobbs told NBC News. “That oath says I’ll uphold the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution laws of the state of Arizona.”

Okay Katie, that’s tremendously reassuring.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of “issues,” California allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to a week after the election, as long as they’re postmarked by the day of the election.

Can’t even imagine why that would undermine faith in the integrity of the system.

Comments

Maricopa County has issues again — 44 Comments

  1. These clowns are elected officials serving four year terms. Gates was last elected to the Maricopa county board of supervisors in 2020. Hobbs was elected as secretary of state ( neo, not AG) in 2018 after receiving millions in Soros money. Her margin of victory was 20,000 votes out of millions cast.

  2. they’ve probably been stealing votes since they forced out sheriff joe, then they stole for synema, then they went big time with 2020, with ducey’s acquiescence,

  3. The Lake/Masters/Hamadeh/RNC lawsuit is still in effect according to a news report.

    People who were unable to vote at one precinct were being advised by poll workers to go to another precinct to vote. What they didn’t tell the voter was they needed to check out of the system before going to the other precinct– where the system indicated the person had already voted.

    This is a real mess.

  5. According to the latest news from AZCentral, only 70% of the vote has been counted after two days. Florida, with thrice the population, produced its results on the evening of the election. How can a rational person not be at least slightly suspicious, especially when recalling how ultimately important and very “problematic” was the tabulation from the same state two years ago, when a senile buffoon confined mostly to his basement managed somehow to win the most votes ever in a presidential election? Something seems to be rotten indeed in the state of Arizona. Apropos of the presidency, Katy Tur on MSNBC suggested (not in jest) that Fetterman might be a possible candidate for 1600.

  7. They also claim no one turned away voters on Tuesday.

    Nice claim. Probably many voters got tired of waiting and left of their own volition. Isn’t that more clever?

  9. Nonapod:

    I read somewhere – and I think it has a good chance of being correct – that in areas that rely on machines, they reduce the number of workers considerably compared to places that hand-count. Then if there’s a problem, and they suddenly need to hand-count, they don’t have anything like the staff they need.

  13. I read somewhere that voting problems generally have not occurred in college towns (where, as we all know, the vote is at least 90 percent Democrat and/or Green).

    I have no idea whether this is true or urban legend or Russian disinformation [/SARC].

    Has anyone else seen this? Any documentation?

  14. There’s also some chatter about sheriff snipers and Ryder trucks dumping ballots at the counting center and not allowing photos, but it’s from GP and other sketchy sources, so I don’t know what to make of it.

  16. To me, that it takes so long to count the votes makes sense. Each individual ballot must be carried up a mountain on the back of a donkey to be counted by an oracle who sends the results by carrier pigeon back to the election offices, where any necessary corrections are made. It’s all quite standard.

  18. The problem with the ballot-counting follies is that there seems to be no remedy and no effective counter-measure.

    What is the vote count over time? I’ve tried to find a live-stream showing these races but haven’t been able to find one this cycle. It would be useful to be seeing this (Vote count vs. time) in real time for all of the outstanding races, to understand trending. It was very clearly suspicious in the 2020 race where, the longer the count lasted, the more it seemed to favor Democrats. So frustrating to see the same mistakes being made, and seemingly no improvements on transparency! Especially in a fresh battleground like Arizona.

    Agree completely about the Gateway Pundit, they’ve become shrill and unreliable.

  19. at a certain point, they are no longer mistakes, they are enemy action, again I recall these games from 2000 in Florida, that was the last time they allowed an outright win, they marked 2004 because diebold, and blamed ken blackwell in 2006 and 2008, they put their secretaries of state in ohio and among other places and it was totes fine, then in 2010, it was koch, then it was totes fine in 2012

  20. Countries with far fewer resources have far greater election integrity and have their counts wrapped up by midnight.

    The only places that take days to count are in the USA where Democrats are in control. The problem isn’t money. It isn’t working equipment. It isn’t know how. It’s a criminal organization and a compliant propaganda arm pretending to be news media.

  21. Most of the outstanding votes are from Azure County. Oh, you won’t find it on the map of AZ..you see it’s a virtual county with at least 100K voters…or more if necessary. Their votes aren’t counted until the BoE see how many they’re short.

  22. In North Carolina, state law requires voter-marked paper ballots and tabulating machines which cannot have a modem or wireless connection. Results are tabulated, downloaded to a special flash drive which is under the control of bipartisan judges at the closing of the polls, and hand-carried to county headquarters (and printed results are hand-carried with a mailed backup copy). Our races were all decided by midnight. Even absentee ballots are quickly tabulated, since county workers validate the information on the envelopes ahead of time. As soon as the polls close, the valid envelopes are opened and the ballots are run through the tabulator. It all works, and recounts and audits show it’s very accurate.

  24. The machine “problem” was largely in GOP districts around Phoenix. In Tucson we voted early (Thursday) and in person. We dropped off our unrequested absentee ballots in a ballot box in an official polling place.

    If Kari Lake gets through this, she has promised to clean up AZ voting and imitate FL.

  26. Mr. G and I voted in Maricopa County, Arizona on Tuesday, in a suburban area that is likely to be GOP territory. Multiple lines were stretched out to the parking lot; one had to wait in a line to get a ballot, then wait in a second line to have it scanned. (You could just drop it in the box, but most people wanted to see it get scanned.) Only one of two or three machines was working for scanning. Supposedly, the trouble you heard about on the national news was due to the ballot printing (not printing marks on the ballots correctly) and was supposedly fixed after about 2pm. Mr. G’s ballot printed a few before mine, at around 2:30.

    We went to mark our votes. Some of the booths had only black non ballpoint pens. I had heard chatter outside about the “Hobbs felt pens” so I picked a booth with a real ballpoint pen and filled mine out with that. Apparently, Mr. G had not heard this, and he did his with one of the non ballpoint pens, which was the only one in the booth he had picked. Instructions on the ballot only said to use black or blue (not red) ink pens.

    After waiting the better part of another hour to scan our ballots, mine went through, his did not. Based on what I saw in front of us, about half of ballots successfully scanned. (This was after the printing problem was supposedly fixed.) The rest got put in the slot for counting later (one hopes). Presumably that’s what they’ve spent the last two days doing – counting ballots from GOP voting areas that wouldn’t scan.

    On the plus side, it was a nuisance in person to use anything but your state driver’s license, and the poll workers were actively trying – mine made an honest effort to compare me to my picture.

    When the first votes came up Tuesday evening, you may recall that Hobbs started off with something like a 160K lead from around 50% estimated votes tallied. That lead vanished to thousands by the end of the evening – presumably when they started counting votes from people who had to show ID to vote.

    As in 2020, the more time goes by, the more Democrat votes surface from somewhere (despite word on the street being that the ballot issues largely plagued red suburbs). Hobbs has slowly extended her lead since Tuesday night. I believe that a similar phenomenon happened with Kelly/Masters but I was watching the governor’s race more closely.

    Luckily, I’m already a bitter cynic, because my illusions would have been shattered. The perception of impropriety was enormous. I know only what I saw and unsubstantiated chitchat, but that was the view on the ground here.

  27. Sorry if this has been asked. Does anyone know how the Alaska congressional race works? I see two republicans splitting the vote against a single democrat. Is there then a vote between the top two?

  28. Alaska is ranked choice.

    It was 3 candidates, now down to top 2 voter getters.

    They will now look whom the Democrat voters put in the 2nd position, and assign accordingly.

    Murkowski backed the change to ranked choice to save her seat.

  30. On the plus side, the US will ALWAYS be willing to help OTHER countries ensure that their elections are free, fair AND secure…

    …and come down HARD on those countries that somehow don’t meet that standard.

    (So ADMIRABLE. Makes one proud to be an American, it does…)

    Here’s a CLASSIC example of which the entire country can indeed be proud—for posterity….
    “Jimmy Carter Gives Seal of Approval to Venezuela Election”—
    https://www.commentary.org/ben-cohen/jimmy-carter-gives-seal-of-approval-to-venezuela-election/
    (Gosh, if only Arizona or Pennsylvania, etc., could be like…Venezuela…)

  32. I grew up in California (turned 18 in 1992). The rule allowing absentee ballots to be counted as long as they’re post marked by election day has been in place for at least 30 years. I actually appreciated it when I voted from an Army base in Germany in 1998. (I only received my absentee ballot maybe a week before the election. Back then, when you received your sample ballot in the mail, you had to fill out the absentee ballot request and mail it back. Every election.)

    I know they have a bad reputation since Florida in 2000, but with all of the issues with electronic vote counting, maybe we should think about going back to the old punch cards. I voted absentee using those 3 times – 1996, 1998, and 2000. Even without the template thing with arrows showing where to punch for your chosen candidate, I managed to figure it out (Candidate Smith is number 16, find #16 on the card) and punch the chads with a bent paper clip. (I will also add that California actually had better counting rules than FL – in order to be counted, the chad had to be completely detached on at least 2 corners, so it could swing like a door. No ‘dimpled chad’ nonsense.)
    There’s no need to print ballots on election day – the ballot books are already pre-printed, and each voter just gets a card.

    Now, question for AZ voters specifically: are ya’ll required to go to a specific, assigned polling station, or can you just go anywhere in your city or county? I remember when I was a kid, my parents would have to go to a specific place (one time it was actually in the garage of someone’s house), but in my county in Texas, I can just show up at any polling station in the county, because the voter database is all computerized.

  33. Lordy, even Democratic mega-corruption is… mega-corrupt…
    “Democrats Crypto Kingpin A Fraud”—
    https://blazingcatfur.ca/2022/11/10/democrats-crypto-kingpin-a-fraud/
    H/T Blazingcatur blog.
    Opening grafs:
    “Crypto megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried helped bankroll Democrats’ overperformance in the midterms. But any friends he may have had in Washington won’t be there for him as his crumbling business empire threatens to torpedo the entire digital currency market.
    “Bankman-Fried’s Washington influence — as well as billions of dollars of his personal wealth — nearly vanished in the span of 48 hours, after it emerged that the giant crypto exchange he founded was insolvent and unable to meet customer withdrawals….”
    + Bonus:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ftx-assets-frozen-bahamas-regulator-liquidator-appointed

  34. Dave L: Now, question for AZ voters specifically: are ya’ll required to go to a specific, assigned polling station, or can you just go anywhere in your city or county?

    We used to have to vote at a designated polling place, but sometime in the past 10 years or so they’ve switched from precinct voting to “Voting Centers”. You may vote at any Voting Center. They are connected at minimum across the County; I’m not certain if they connect State-wide.

  35. Regardless of who wins, the integrity of Arizona elections has been compromised again by corrupt or incompetent Maricopa County officials. All involved, right up to Republican Supervisors, should be replaced ASAP.

    If the Democrats don’t steal this election for Katie Hobbs, another Democrat mediocrity, it will only be because the notoriety of the delaying ploy has created fear of prosecution.

  37. The reason it takes so long to count in Arizona is that a voter can request a mailed ballot, and instead of mailing it back, return it to a voting center. Republicans have been doing this a lot.

    That ballot now has to have the signature compared with the original voter registration. This is what takes so long. Once the signature is verified, then the ballot goes into the pile to be counted.

    When there are 3 million signatures to compare, it’s just going to take a long time.

    The point of all this crap is to make voting “easier.” Many millions are spent on equipment that cannot be audited, and paying poll workers for many more hours and days. Sure, one can vote at any “voting center.” But to do that there must be a whole lot of expensive equipment all networked (and thus vulnerable to hacking).

    Every time election officials get clever millions are wasted and voters have less confidence in the results.

  38. Issues in Harris County:

    “At least 12 locations in Harris County are out of paper needed to print ballots. Some have been waiting for hours for paper and turning voters away.”

    For those who may not understand… In Harris County (maybe a Texas thing now), you are handed a sheet of a paper (two at my polling place, because of the number of races); you walk to a computer (not much different than the electric machines of the past) and make your choices which are then printed on the ballot. You then take your paper to another machine that scans and counts your ballot as it then drops into an actual ballot box. This gives a hard count of votes that can also be hand counted in a recount. However, you cannot count votes of ballots that never had paper to be cast.

    The county judge position was decided for the Democrat by 17,000 votes (1.5%). The early voting differential was 2,000 votes. Election day differential was 3,000 votes. And the mail in ballot differential was 12,000 votes.

  39. Of all the counties in the entire country, the one which needed to be a combination of pure as the driven snow and humming like a $10k Swiss watch was Maricopa County.
    What did it have going for it? A poison record from the last time around, all of whose suspicions were proven unfounded by hiding all the evidence.
    The then Secretary of State, one of whose jobs is making sure of election efficiency and integrity failed, quite strategically, then. The then secretary of state is still the secretary of state and a failure of efficiency and integrity in Maricopa will make her governor. So in order to be elected governor and seem legitimate, she needed to make sure Maricopa county worked well.
    Either she was too incompetent to do that, with a couple of years to get it fixed up–but will make a fine governor, or she is a crook again, but will make a fine governor.
    It would have been to her advantage to have Maricopa functioning well so as to not cast doubt on the election she is overseeing when she is elected. Except perhaps then she wouldn’t have been elected.

    Looks like another couple of years of “What are you going to do about it?”

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