By David Lindfield, Slay
On Monday, Maricopa County released a report by former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor on the causes of the ballot printer issues on Election Day.
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According to the report, the county expanded the length of the ballots from 19 inches during the primary election to 20 inches in the general election in order to include all of the required information.
The increased ballot size in combination with the use of 100-pound ballot paper, the report concludes, was too great a strain on some older printers that were used.
Regarding the issue of ballots being printed for 19-inch paper rather than 20-inch, the report concluded that “ballots were re-sized as ‘fit to page,’ a process that entirely changed the location of the timing marks on the ballots and assured that neither the on-site tabulators nor the central count tabulators could read the ballots.”
It couldn’t be determined whether the reason for this change was “from a technician attempting to correct the printing issues … or a problem internal to the printers,” according to the report.
However, during the investigators’ “testing, four printers randomly printed one or a few ‘fit to page’ ballots in the middle of printing a batch of ballots.
“None of the technical people with whom we spoke could explain how or why that error occurred.”
Read the rest here.
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