PHOENIX—It was a sweltering 112 degrees in Scottsdale, Arizona, as I climbed into my truck at 8 a.m. on July 30, 2024. Primary election day was in full swing, and I had volunteered to be a roving attorney at the polls.
Despite the heat, I was on a mission to observe as many Maricopa County vote centers as possible. I hoped that the day would be uneventful and foreshadow a smooth general election in November, unlike Election Day in November 2022.
On primary election day in 2022, I had embarked on my first foray as a roving attorney in the Republican National Committee’s Election Integrity program. The RNC had me visit 11 Maricopa County polling sites. My subsequent written report to the RNC stated that six of my 11 vote centers had tabulators that struggled to count the ballots because the on-site printers were not producing sufficiently dark ballots. I noted limited failures of the printer/tabulators at five of those six polling locations. However, both tabulators at Paradise Valley’s First Southern Baptist Church failed to work at all. (READ MORE: The Real Reason Democrats Fear Losing in November)
Unfortunately, my 2022 primary report landed on deaf ears. The RNC took no action. Several months later, the impact of that inaction became frighteningly clear. The same printer/tabulator malfunctions that I observed during the July primary returned in spades at Maricopa County vote centers in November, disproportionately disenfranchising Republicans, who composed 80 percent of Election Day voters.
On Nov. 8, 2022, I observed 10 vote centers. Seven of them had significant problems getting the tabulators to count the printed ballots.
After Election Day, I surveyed 10 other roving attorneys. Together, we had observed 115 of Maricopa County’s 223 vote centers. Based on those interviews, I wrote a comprehensive report that concluded that (a) 62 percent of the vote centers we visited had material problems with tabulators that could not read printed ballots and (b) 51 percent of the vote centers we visited featured significant lines in which voters were forced to wait one to four hours, due to printer/tabulator malfunctions. (READ MORE: Kamala Chameleon’s Girl From the Hood Gambit)
The post-election sworn declarations of poll workers and voters proved that many citizens who went to the polls that day left without voting because of the tabulator problems and long lines. Beyond question, Republican voters disproportionately were disenfranchised on Election Day by Maricopa County’s technical failures. Most infuriating, my primary-election observations foreshadowed the snafus on general Election Day 2022. And yet the RNC did nothing during the intervening months to prevent that general election technological disaster.
With this background, I observed Maricopa County’s vote centers yet again. During Arizona’s July 30, 2024, primary I visited 11 polling sites and witnessed assorted technical breakdowns:
While each of these failures occurred at only one vote center, I also discovered a tabulator paper-jam problem at multiple polling centers that could wreak havoc during the upcoming general election.
I arrived at North Scottsdale Methodist Church at 2:45 p.m. The poll inspector named Paulette told me that she made an executive decision to use one of her two tabulators that worked. Ballots were jamming in the other one. She reasoned that the functioning tabulator seemed to be handling the light primary-voter traffic. Nevertheless, I was concerned that tabulator jamming, once again, could disenfranchise election-day voters during the heavy turnout of the impending presidential showdown. (READ MORE: The Establishment Media Has Gaslit America for Four Years)
Paulette let me observe the tabulator jam. She asked a voter to insert his ballot into the tabulator. The tabulator appeared to count the ballot, but a “Paper Jam” error then appeared on the digital screen atop the device. Paulette unlocked the back of the tabulator and revealed that the ballot was stuck inside the machine and had not dropped into the box of tabulated ballots. Paulette manually removed the stuck ballot from the tabulator. She mistakenly placed it into a box of untabulated ballots that needed to be counted at central headquarters. I reminded her that the ballot should have been placed into the box of already-tabulated ballots. She agreed and moved that ballot into the correct box. Paulette then relocked the tabulator and entered a code to clear the “Paper Jam” error from the tabulator screen and reset it for the next voter. This entire process consumed two to three minutes.
Fifteen minutes later, a Maricopa County Troubleshooter arrived to fix the tabulator. Election officials had instructed her to clean the machine by running a cleaning sheet through it several times. This effort failed. The North Scottsdale Methodist Church voting site operated the rest of the day at half-capacity, with only one functioning tabulator.
A bit later that afternoon, Jamie, the poll inspector at Venue 8600, told me that her vote center also was equally hobbled, with one tabulator running smoothly and the other plagued with the same paper jam problem that I witnessed at the Methodist church.
If this “Paper Jam” mess recurs amid the throngs of voters in Greater Phoenix on November 5, 2024, it will make November 2022’s mishaps resemble a pleasant desert breeze.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Mark Sonnenklar, Esq. is a business transactions attorney who practiced in Los Angeles and Phoenix. He founded and ran a Los Angeles Tea Party group from 2010 to 2016. He is a Maricopa County, Arizona, precinct committeeman.
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