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Maricopa County's controversial voting malfunction decisive for Arizona governorship

The Arizona county is the second largest electoral district in the country. In the 2020 presidential elections, controversy has arisen claiming that there was electoral fraud.

Midterms 2022/ voting machines.

(Cordon Press)

Published by
Verónica Silveri Pazos

In Maricopa County, Ariz., some of the 17,000 votes affected by tabulation system failures still remain uncounted. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates promised to "get to the bottom" of the problem and assured that "all ballots will be counted securely and accurately."

While the issue impacted less than 7% of Election Day voters (about 17,000 ballots), we understand that for the people who went through it, this was frustrating, inconvenient, and not how they pictured Election Day. We plan to get to the bottom of it ... Voters impacted by the printer issue had several ways to cast their ballot yesterday, including dropping their completed ballot into a secure box (door 3) on site. Those ballots will be verified as legitimate and then tabulated at MCTEC. 

These votes began to be counted Wednesday along with some 90,000 ballots that arrived by mail. The results of the Arizona gubernatorial race between Republican Kari Lake and Democrat Katie Hobbs are still pending, as is the Senate race between Mark Kelly (D) and Blake Masters (R).

Sixty polling places affected

Early Tuesday morning, it was reported that the tabulators (the machines that read the ballots) in about 60 voting centers registered problems with the paper, which did not allow some ballots to be read properly.

Kari Lake immediately took to social media to inform voters of the steps to follow in the event of problems at their polling place.

According to the Gates, the machines had been used previously and had worked properly during the primaries:

The printer settings for the Ballot-On-Demand printers at Vote Centers were the same ones we used in the August Primary. The paper was the same thickness. Prior to the General Election, the Elections Department test-printed and test-tabulated hundreds of ballots without issue. 

Gates later claimed that all votes will be counted, apologized to voters for the inconvenience, and stated that what happened should not be "used to question the integrity of the election":

There was no one who came today with a valid ID who was turned away from the polls. Even when we had this [issue] and we hadn’t figured out the solution, people were still able to vote. It was just a matter of maybe not voting in the way they wanted to. 

Maricopa County is the second largest congressional district in the country. It has been under national scrutiny since the 2020 presidential election due to the emergence of controversies regarding electoral fraud.

GOP lawsuit

The Lake and Masters campaigns along with the Republican National Committee (RNC) have sued the county over the voting problems. The complaint sought to keep the polls open longer and also asked that the state court "instruct the inspector at every polling location that voters whom the e-pollbook have recorded as having previously voted in this election must be permitted to complete and cast a provisional ballot."

GOP / Maricopa by Voz Media on Scribd

The complaint was rejected by a judge who argued that the court had no evidence that there were voters who were prevented from exercising their right to vote.

Although the results are not yet conclusive, Lake assured that she would win the election:

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