An overwhelming majority of poll observers and election workers in Maricopa County said they are “not at all confident” about the outcome of the 2022 midterm election in Arizona's most populous county.
In a survey sent by the Election Integrity Network to election volunteers, 85 percent expressed a lack of confidence in how officials handled the midterm vote.
The survey also found:
• 95% of respondents said their biggest concern with the election process was “voting technology.”
• Observers reported “chaos” at multiple voting centers caused by printer and tabulator malfunctions, all day, contradicting statements by county officials that the problems had been "solved."
• Volunteer attorneys reported "findings [that] directly contradict the statements of county election officials."
Mark Sonnenklar, one of the roving attorneys working on behalf of the Republican National Committee’s Election Integrity program in Maricopa on election day, reported what he and 10 other roving attorneys "observed at a total of 115 vote centers out of a total of 223 vote centers in the county."
"In many vote centers, the tabulators rejected the initial insertion of a ballot almost 100% of the time, although the tabulators might still accept that ballot on the second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth attempt to insert the ballot," Sonnenklar reported. "However, many ballots were not able to be tabulated by the tabulators at all, no matter how many times the voter inserted the ballot."
Sonnenklar said that the percentage of ballots that the tabulator machines were not able to read was between 25% and 40%.
"In many cases, the printer/tabulator issues persisted from the beginning of election day until the end of election day," Sonnenklar said. "The strong consensus regarding why the tabulators would not read certain ballots was that those ballots, in particular the bar codes on the side of the paper, were not printing dark enough for the tabulators to read them."
Sonnenklar added: "These findings directly contradict the statements of county election officials that (1) printer/tabulator issues were limited to only 70 of the 223 vote centers, (2) the printer/tabulator problems were resolved as of 3:00 p.m., and (3) the printer/tabulator issues were insignificant in the entire scheme of the election."
Additionally, the roving attorneys reported that the printer/tabulator failures on election day occurred at more than 60% of the vote centers "and the resulting long lines at a majority of all vote centers, led to substantial voter suppression. Moreover, because Republican voters significantly outnumbered Democrat voters in the County on election day, such voter suppression would necessarily impact the vote tallies for Republican candidates much more than the vote tallies for Democrat candidates."
(Read the entire election day report from the roving attorneys here.)
My message to the People of Arizona & the United States: pic.twitter.com/mtNBl7728S
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 21, 2022
Free Press International
[Freedom Is Not Free!]
