Election Day is increasingly looking like election month, and frankly, unless state residents under our federal system get control of this, I see no end to it. In the worst cases, ballots are emailed to everyone who has ever been registered to vote whether or not they’ve died or moved away, faulty ballot printing results in valid ballots being tossed, equipment failures misregister votes, ballot drop boxes are left unmonitored, and so on -- all of which contribute to an atmosphere in which corruption flourishes. The more this happens, the more voters believe they cannot vote themselves out of policies and politicians with which they disagree. That is not an insignificant problem.

Arizona once again leads in sloppy election handling. One can blame incompetence, but as these sloppy procedures seem to always favor the Left, there’s reason for suspicion.

President Trump has called for the Arizona election to be rerun. 

So in Maricopa County they’re at it again. Voting machines in large numbers didn’t work, but only in Republican districts. People were forced to wait for hours, then got exhausted or had other things to do and left the voting lines by the thousands. Even Kari Lake was taken to a Liberal Democrat district in order to vote. Others weren’t so lucky. This is a scam and voter fraud, no different than stuffing the ballot boxes. They stole the Election from Blake Masters. Do Election over again!

Flopping Aces calls Arizona the “most corrupt state in the nation.” Certainly, the state faces some stiff competition in that regard, though its election handling places it in the top rung.

Following a 2020 audit, Arizona bought 400 new voting machines, ordered by the Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.  Maricopa County tests all of its voting machines prior to each election.

MARICOPA COUNTY, Ariz. – Maricopa County is testing out its voting machines -- the process is done before and after every election. Why? It’s to make sure there are no issues with the counting of votes.

The process of checking the machines is called the “logic and accuracy test.” The process, while underway, is open to the public. This way, Maricopa County Elections Department can make sure it’s programmed the equipment accurately, and they are going to count all the ballots for the general election as they are designed.

Yet right on cue come election day, the machines fail to work properly.

Maricopa County, Arizona, Supervisor Bill Gates apologized after roughly 20% of their polling sites had problems with tabulation machines reading ballots just hours after Election Day polls opened.

The Arizona county had explained that some machines had problems with their printers and were not producing dark enough ink on ballots.

During a Wednesday news conference, Gates said that of the approximately 250,000 in-person votes that were cast on Election Day, “the lion’s share” have been counted and reported, but 7% -- or about 17,000 ballots -- were placed in a drop box and had still not been counted due to the printing errors.

The County then began a hand count

Maricopa County election officials in Arizona’s most populous region have begun a hand count audit, officials announced late Wednesday.

“The hand count audit has begun,” the county’s election department said on Twitter. “Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian party chairs drew the races and ballots that hand count audit boards will review Saturday.

The Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was in charge of this election, and as a candidate for election to governor she should have recused herself.

To put this mashup in perspective, Ryan Petty tweets:

Ryan Petty

@rpetty

In the time it has taken California, Arizona and Nevada to count 70-80% of the votes from this election, Florida counted 100% of millions of votes, had a hurricane and already rebuilt a hurricane damaged highway.

Let that sink in.

The most informative description of the failures of the Arizona election failures is found at Powerline Blog where Scott Johnson quotes a lengthy letter from John A. Clifford, an attorney who lives in the now notorious Maricopa County. 

Among the problems he notes are these:

The ballots are intended to have registration marks on them to allow the scanner to tell which form is being scanned, and tallied accordingly. I don’t know if you run a printer at your home, but I can tell you I have lots of hiccups and frustration from my little print shop on my desk. Did the polling place use the right paper, the right ink, or give the voter a pen that bleeds through and can be seen from on the other side? What level of QC is going on there? Some voters reported that the felt tip pen they were given bled through. What else could go wrong? I used a ballpoint pen myself.

Anyway, trouble ensued again this year. I think we made the system too complicated to run smoothly. Of course, we made things worse by reducing the number of polling places after a year when we had small turnout and a bunch of bureaucrats saw a chance to save money. Add a layer of CoVid-excused changes and we are certainly now off to the turtle races this year. I suspect the IT guys told them, sure this should work. We got this. What is your experience with a technology fix to make your life easier?

When some ballots refused to go through the scanners, some voters were told just to go to a different polling place and try again. Once they got to the new place they were told that since they had checked in and received a ballot at the prior location they would not be given another ballot. Makes sense, but not if your first ballot was trashed. Which brings me to “drawer 3.”

Apparently, some of the unscannable ballots were placed into a “secure lock box” where the authorities essentially said we intend to scan these somewhere else at a time to be determined. Since the ballot would not scan where it was filled in, who believes it will scan downtown? Hand tally anyone?

No one can say what the outcome of the race for Arizona governor will be, but if it turns out to be Kari Lake, who in my opinion deserves it, you can expect a great deal of change in Arizona’s ballot handling and vote counting. If not, expect the same mess in 2024.