Every ballot tabulator in Maricopa County’s 2022 election failed to meet Election Assistance Commission (EAC) standards, with all 444 machines experiencing ballot reading errors exceeding the allowable .2 percent error rate, according to a video released by We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA), led by Shelby Busch. Despite litigation from Kari Lake, courts declined to order a new election.
The WPAA video highlights widespread issues with printers and tabulators during Arizona’s 2022 election, which saw significant tabulator misreads. Busch and her co-host Bryan Blehm, who previously represented Kari Lake in an election lawsuit, interviewed Dr. Walter Daugherity, a senior lecturer emeritus for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M, who graduated from Oklahoma Christian University with a degree in mathematics, and then later earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University.
Daugherity, who worked with WPAA before on the 2022 election, and served as a witness on Lake’s and State Senator Mark Finchem (R-Buckeye)’s lawsuit over voting machines, said he became interested in the issue after analyzing Pima County’s 2020 election where he found that “nine or 10 precincts had more votes than registered voters.” He found the same thing after investigating Maricopa County, he said.
The professor said there is “almost zero percent transparency [with the machines].” He explained, “All we really know now is that ballots go into the machine and results come out, but we have no idea what goes on in between.” He said there should only be “100 lines of code” to read a ballot, not “millions.”
Daugherity said to change election results, it doesn’t need to involve a significant number of people, “it only takes one programmer.” He explained how the tabulators “spit the ballot back out” because the printers were programmed to print 19-inch ballots, but were fed 20-inch paper.
He expressed concern that NGOs have access to election computers. The nonprofit Center for Information Security (CIS) partners with the federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “to provide monitoring services for counties, school districts, things like that,” Daugherity said.
He said they rely on an “Albert sensor” that is “installed inside the firewall of the county” to detect hacking. The Albert sensor reports back to CIS both unauthorized attempts to enter the system as well as unauthorized traffic going out such as accessing porn sites.
Daugherity cited a ransomware attack that occurred on election computers in Lincoln County, Washington, which encrypted the files so they could not be accessed. The hacker demanded a ransom for a decryption key to unlock the systems. Daugherity said the county stopped using that computer system as a result.
“I don’t know if Maricopa County has partnered with the Center for Internet Security or not, but many counties across the country have, and that basically provides CIS this nongovernmental organization with access,” he explained.
Blehm pointed out that CISA “has access to our judicial system or has communications with members of our judicial branch of government. We also know that CIS has access to the Maricopa County Attorney’s office.”
Busch said, “Based on what I’ve read, it appears that the Albert sensor is being used in Maricopa County elections as well, but we have just issued a public records request right asking for the information of use and partnership.”
She added, “I think one of the biggest things we have learned is that they are willing to create whatever narrative they choose, and then when that narrative is somehow debunked or disproven with credible evidence, they totally gaslight and change their position. Over and over we talked about that with file deletions, servers.”
The attorney said when then-Maricopa County co-Elections Director Scott Jarrett (who is now the sole elections director) testified during Lake’s lawsuit about the problems that he said during the first day of trial, there was “no disruption” and he “knew nothing about the 19-inch ballot definition issue.”
Busch played a video clip of Jarrett testifying.
He said, “That’s not a disruption when voters still had valid options to participate in dropping in those ballots in our secure door number three, which is a similar process that eight other counties use as their only option for voters to be able to return their ballots.” She displayed a chart showing how all 444 tabulators had an unacceptable number of ballot misreads. Voters who could not get their ballot fed properly were given an option to leave their ballot in a “door three” box to be taken and tabulated later at the central count.
Daugherity observed, “For every 30-minute period throughout the day, there were 7,000 or 8,000 problems across the county.”
Busch played more of Jarrett’s testimony. Lake’s attorney Kurt Olsen asked him if he had heard reports of “the 19-inch ballot image being placed on a 20-inch paper.” Jarrett responded, “I did not.”
Olsen pressed, “Would that be a failure of Maricopa County’s election process?” Jarrett responded, “I’m not aware of it occurring, and I’d be surprised that there was a ballot-on-demand printer that had a 19-inch ballot … and the reason why is we did not design a 2022 general election on a 19-inch ballot. That ballot does not exist. The only ballot that exists is a 20-inch ballot.”
Jarrett admitted, “It would, if something like that happened, which I don’t know how it would, yes, it would have been a mistake.”
Olsen continued, “Could that have also been a deliberate act?” Jarrett answered, “Again, you’re asking me to speculate about things that I have no knowledge of occurring. So I don’t know if it could have been a deliberate act or not. I don’t believe that that occurred.”
As Olsen pressed, Jarrett began to admit that the county knew about the problem.
“When we started doing the audit reconciliation of those door three ballots, we identified some of those ballots had then a fit to paper issue,” Jarrett said. “I don’t remember the exact dates, but a few days after Election Day,” he said.
Olsen asked him if the problem had occurred in previous elections. “It happened in the August 2020 primary election, the November 2020 general election, and August 2022 primary election,” Jarrett said.
Busch said Jarrett committed perjury three times, and Blehm added, “He admitted that they found out about those ballots prior to his first day of trial.”
Busch said it “made no sense” that the tabulators at the vote centers had the problem, but when the three ballots were taken back to the central count, those tabulators worked fine. Daugherity agreed. “It’s the same program. If it won’t scan on the tabulator at the polling place or the voting center, it won’t scan at central count either.”
Busch pointed out, “If they were to program the tabulators at central count to read ballots differently than the ballot, the poll centers or the vote centers, that would actually be a violation of the EAC, right?”
The trio discussed a side issue that arose during the election, where the printers’ temperatures weren’t high enough or the stock was too thick, which was resolved by using Sharpies on the ballots.
Busch said, “This to me is a prime example of convolution, where they convolute the issues. Because yes, there were printer issues and the tiny marks, but that was a completely different issue.”
Next, the group discussed a root cause analysis conducted by former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Ruth McGregor. The report was criticized by election attorney Jennifer Wright, who previously represented Lake and Representative Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ-08) in their election litigation and served as the civil attorney for the attorney general’s office.
She said, “The report proves printers failed, but doesn’t identify WHY some Oki printers experienced more problems than others. It seems to ‘exonerate’ MC without determining the ROOT cause of failure. It’s surface level stuff. It’s embarrassing. It would fail cross-examination.”
Busch read a line from McGregor’s report, “Although this investigation examines only the possible explanations for the printer malfunctions on election day, I note that subsequent proceedings have established that all votes were counted, with most of the misprinted ballots being transported to the more powerful election central tabulators, which tabulated them without issue.”
She criticized the claim. “So they keep saying this falsity … just fed into these super power computers in central count, and everything was fine.”
Busch said regarding another problem with the election, “They have literally admitted, and they admitted it to [election expert] Clay Parikh during the ballot inspection. They don’t even have a system to remarry those duplicates to their original ballots, and they’re supposed to be serial numbered so they can be matched together.”
Blehm expounded further, “I don’t even think they’re printing the duplicate. I think they’re just uploading it.” He said when auditing the 2020 election he found that “many of the serial numbers weren’t present on duplicated ballots, and/or the serial numbers were sort of almost as if intentionally placed over the timing mark, you couldn’t read the serial number. They were the same color, and completely … we were never able to marry the duplicated ballot.”
Daugherity pointed out that “federal law, Title 52 U.S. Code 21081, it says that for federal elections, there must be a permanent paper record with a manual audit capability. And what that means is, I ought to be able to pick any line in the cast vote record report spreadsheet and say, show me the ballot that has the votes on it, and they could find that piece of paper.”
Busch said Oki printers responded critically to McGregor’s report after “being thrown under the bus.” The company stated its manual specifies 80-pound cardstock is required for ballots, not 100-pound.
Busch blamed the third party vendor, Runbeck Election Services. “Runbeck knew exactly what ballot weight paper,” she said. “It was because they work on the ballot definitions, because they print them for the mail-in ballots, and they work very closely with the county on this. So, you know, we cannot, I believe, we cannot, discount the involvement of Runbeck.”
She asked Daugherity how a proper investigation should have been conducted. He responded, “You make a list of what could cause this, and then you systematically go about either eliminating it or validating it.” He said the EAC never approved the version of the software used on the tabulators.
She asked him what were the top ways it could have happened. Daugherity said the two most likely ways were “pre-programming” and the “insertion of malware or a virus.” The following two possible ways were “local or remote access” to the computers.
Blehm said the problem with McGregor’s report is that she “only looked at the toner issue.” He said, “I think this investigation was intentionally limited to [that] specific issue. It was so limited, and that her team, given the so little information, that it was designed to find an outcome. … And the more important issue that I have is, you know, the potential implications for people accessing this VPN, which travels through the cloud, is traveling through all these networked computers.”
Busch explained, “It’s the reason why they deny many different public records that they don’t want people to see, or they fail to respond to public records. And a lot of these issues are because they don’t want to have to admit that there is a possibility for these machines to be altered and hacked.”
Daugherity said, “We shouldn’t move on from 2020 since there was no root cause analysis done of the printers.” Busch added, “A nation that doesn’t know their history is due to repeat it.”
The remainder of the video focused on problems in Arapahoe County, Colorado, which Daugherity investigated and contends the cast vote record was altered in the 2020 election.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to .
Photo “We the People AZ Alliance Video” by We the People AZ Alliance.
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