I thought they printed ballots on 20” paper which didn’t fit in the ballot counters; jamming the counter.
As explained during today’s portion of the trial, the issues were:
1. Ballots for the general Nov 2022 election were all set at 20” paper size.
2. The “on demand ballot printers” were pre-programmed by the county and admin password required to change the image parameters.
3. The printer printed out a 19” ballot on the 20” paper.
4. The tabulator/s were unable to read the ballots because the 19” image was not recognized by the tabulator.
5. The “unread” ballots were placed in drawer 3 to be transported later to the county central county center where they were then run through the county tabulator, (different machine, more sensitive), and when it still would not read the ballot the ballot was “duplicated”.
6. Duplication involved printing a new, 20”, blank ballot and copying, (supposedly), accurately the rejected ballot onto the new 20” ballot and then run through the tabulator and counted.
7. One problem identified during the court ordered exam of the ballots was that the original ballot, (19” ballot printed on 20” paper), that the expert examined were not accompanied with the “duplicate ballot” that are required to be kept with the original ballot and he was told that it would take 6 hours to track down the “duplicate ballot” for the expert to view.
8. The state tried to explain the 19-20” issue away by suggesting that someone might have pushed a print to size button, however, since the county recorder testified that only 20” images were on the computer/printer, thus making pushing a print to size button would not result in the printer printing a 19” image/ballot on a 20” paper because shrinking to fit the paper would only result in printing a 20” ballot image.
it's not the length of the paper, it's how long the tabulator THINKS it is.