Posted on 12/18/2022 7:53:06 AM PST by grundle
Recently disclosed internal communications between top election officials in Arizona's Maricopa County in the immediate aftermath of Election Day reveal that they struggled to reconcile a discrepancy of almost 16,000 in outstanding ballot totals.
The governor's race in Arizona was decided by a margin of just over 17,000 votes.
Maricopa County was plagued by numerous issues with ballot machines at many of its vote centers on Election Day, resulting in delays and long lines.
Prior to a Maricopa County press conference with Board of Supervisors Chair Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer on Nov. 10, Richer sent an email to Elections Director Scott Jarrett, Gates and others about a significant discrepancy between the county's estimated remaining ballot totals and the number reported by the secretary of state's office.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was also the Democratic nominee for governor in the Nov. 8 election.
"Unable to currently reconcile SOS listing with our estimates from yesterday," Richer wrote, showing that Maricopa County estimated having 392,000 ballots left to be counted, while the secretary of state's website said there were 407,664 ballots left.
"So there's a 15,000 difference somewhere," Richer said, although the discrepancy cited was closer to16,000.
The recorder's office did not provide comment on the ballot discrepancy by publication deadline.
The Richer email was among the communications obtained via a public records request submitted by America First Legal Foundation. The email is found on page 9 in the records below: File Maricopa County PRR 1292 PDF Export - Watermark (1) (1).pdf
In an email forwarded to Jarrett by the chief of staff for Board of Supervisors Vice Chairman Clint Hickman, a poll worker said that at their vote center, the ballot tabulators worked 75% of the time, as approximately 400 of 1600 in-person votes were "misreads and put in slot 3."
"Ballots were put in the tabulator several times to get accepted," the poll worker reported. "Ballots were flipped, put in backwards, flipped again before it might get accepted."
The poll worker further reported that a voter who recently moved between cities within the state received a ballot for only federal elections, not state elections.
"Totally unacceptable," the poll worker commented.
"These errors need to be resolved," the poll worker concluded.
The email from the poll worker is on page 6 of the file embedded above.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted to certify its election on Nov. 28, after listening to a flood of complaints from voters regarding issues they experienced trying to vote.
Mohave County certified its election "under duress," after being threatened with possible felony charges by Secretary of State Hobbs' office. Cochise County chose not to certify until a judge ordered them to, following a lawsuit against them filed by the secretary of state's office.
According to a lawsuit filed by GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake challenging the administration of the 2022 election in Maricopa County, a poll found that 58.6% of Republican voters in the county "reported having issues while trying to cast a ballot on Election Day," compared to 15.5% of Democrat voters.
The lawsuit also alleges that 59% of Maricopa County's 223 vote centers suffered ballot printer and tabulator failures.
The GOPe is fine with the outcome, regardless how it was obtained.
It’s pretty clear. There was fraud. Some radical judge demanded they certify the election even though those tasked with certifying did not believe it was legitimate. Whatcha gone do, AZ?
Even ONE legitimate Vote being disenfranchised is not at all acceptable.
This bullshit must end!
Odds are 1 in 100 that this will go anywhere in the courts, because courts are very good at looking at administrative maleficence and not seeing criminal or civil intent. If the judicial would enforce laws on the executive, the executive may examine the judicial and we cannot have that.
It just has to turn off 3 in 100 AZ swing voters and the next election will change. The AZ sec of state position race will not be ignored for the next 40 years.
The next step for AZ is authorize medical assisted suicide, three in 12 healthy AZ liberals would pull that leaver.
Democrats saddened
They had jobs, you see, and family to feed. The pressure was too much......besides, Kari was not perfect, nor their particular favorite.
Face it. We don’t have elections in America anymore. Does it strike anyone funny (no so funny) that the Secretary of State, who is running for governor, knows how many ballots need to be counted? A real eff’n election is done on Election Day, in person, on paper ballots cast legally by America citizens, once and only once in the precinct where the voter lives, and counted by hand at the precinct where the ballot was cast and observed by all political parties and any citizen the desires to observe. No one know how many ballots there are until they are counted.
HOW MUCH EVIDENCE of fraud does the voting public need to stand for???
This BLATANT, IMO.
Long shot, but not impossible, for Kari Lake to turn this thing around.
If she does and the case out of NC, that is being heard by SCOTUS, could be game changers.
Completely up end the system and render Elias and his crew useless.
After that, it would be up to state legislatures to do the right thing.
Sure we do - it's just that they reserve the right to make substitutions if they don't like the public's choices.
Sure, good luck with that.
This is why the number one thing we as voters can do is to vote out RINOs in the STATE LEGISLATURES every two years and replace them with MAGA. We made significant changes to these legislatures in 2022. We must continue with this effort. It is the only way we get our country back.
If the SCOTUS case from NC gets adjudicated properly, the authority of the state legislatures in determining election law will have been clearly stated.
Kari Lake has vowed to take her case all the way to SCOTUS, and it's pretty hard to see how they could say she has "no standing." Also, it seems pretty clear that people who voted on election day were held to a different standard to those who mailed in their ballots...We shall see.
and even if everything goes perfectly, conservatives are once again forced to run the table and do decades of grunt work just to get ‘justice’.
True, sadly.
But those very same Conservatives need to take a good look in the mirror and realize they’re to blame for a lot of it.
The right person won so that’s all that mattered.
As far as balancing the ballots, it is impossible with the rules used in AZ elections.
It cannot even come close!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.