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Witness says printer settings were deliberately changed in Maricopa County

A high percentage of the votes were printed on the wrong paper size. In addition, the chain of custody procedures were not properly followed.

Kari Lake, Arizona

Gage Skidmore

Published by
Alejandro Baños

Kari Lake presented evidence in the trial held Wednesday and Thursday as she tried to explain the electoral fraud she believes took place in the midterm elections. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson granted the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona the opportunity to prove her allegations of voter fraud. The trial concerns two of the charges: alleged intentional interference by election officials with Maricopa County ballot printers and violations of the chain of custody of ballot boxes.

Printed ballots with other dimensions

On the first day of the trial, the plaintiffs focused on the failures allegedly committed by election officials. Lake's attorneys randomly selected 113 ballots for review and showed that 48 of them were printed at 19 inches, when they should have been 20 inches. For this reason, the printers counted the votes as invalid.

Via Twitter, the Kari Lake campaign spoke of "deliberate sabotage":

The Republican candidate called those in charge of running the elections "clowns and scoundrels" for printing defective ballots:

Were printer settings changes premeditated?

One of the witnesses who examined the defective ballots, Clay Parikh, claimed that someone must have changed the configuration of the printers:

These are not a bump against the printer and the settings change. There are security configurations. I’ve reviewed the evidence, and the printers are configured via script, which by any large organization that has to do multiple systems is the standard. It takes away the human error of somebody miscoding in the instructions on the printer.

Furthermore, Parikh responded with a resounding "no" when asked by the judge whether the configuration change could have occurred accidentally.

Arizona's election director, Scott Jarrett, testified that the configuration of the printers took place on Election Day and potentially disenfranchised many citizens:

- Is it your testimony that the printer set changes that led to the so-called "shrink to fit" issue was that done on Election Day?
- That's correct.

The "legal requirements for chain of custody" were not followed

Regarding the other charge, election investigator Heather Honey asserted that both the county and contractor Runbeck Election Services did not follow the "legal requirements for the chain of custody," as confirmed to him by an employee of the company that guarantees the democratic integrity of the United States:

[The employee] She expressed her concern over the fact that the procedure that had been well established during the election had not been used for the large number of election day dropbox ballots that were received. Her concern was that specifically the seals were being removed from the transport containers, and the ballots inside were not counted. That was a requirement, as she understood it, and the fact that they were just taking those ballots out of the transport containers without counting them was her primary concern.

Honey added:

They weren't following the legal requirements for chain of custody. There were seals on the containers when they transported them, but the specific problems were that they simply opened them, took out the ballots, put them in trays without taking into account how many there were; there was no documentation.
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