UPDATE: Maricopa County Printer Issue—17,000 Ballots Potentially IMPACTED

Maricopa County seems to have a problem…

For 2 years and counting, Maricopa County has been the feature of numerous headlines relating to election ‘irregularities’—we will call them that.

Most recently, we reported that Maricopa County’s 2022 midterm elections were suffering from a tabulation error and in response, the RNC asked for a 3-hour extension on polling.

Following the troubling ‘irregularities’ the county was sued by Kari Lake and the RNC…

Now we are getting word that 17,000 ballots were potentially impacted by a ‘printing error’ resulting from some sort of calibration problem on the ballot printer.

Previously, Maricopa County officials claimed that the issue was resolved through a simple recalibration of the printer’s ink settings:

Breaking: Maricopa County announces they have seemingly fixed the tabulation issue…by changing the printer ink settings. pic.twitter.com/YIiUzsGRnC

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) November 8, 2022

That story seems to have changed, according to Charlie Kirk, and others thought it was laughable that the printer settings were not checked prior to sending out the ballots:

Now Maricopa County says *70* out of its 223 voting locations were impacted by printer problems on Tuesday, up from initial estimate of about 60. Election Day voters skew heavily Republican. What a joke.

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 10, 2022

Who doesn't check Tabulators and Printer Settings before an Election~

Maricopa County ..😂 https://t.co/MeeWUAtTab

— Lawyerforlaws (@lawyer4laws) November 10, 2022

The Epoch Times reports:

“The printer settings for the Ballot-On-Demand printers at Vote Centers were the same ones we used in the August Primary,” the chair’s statement reads.

“The paper was the same thickness. Prior to the General Election, the Elections Department test-printed and test-tabulated hundreds of ballots without issue.”

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The issue impacted “less than 7 percent of Election Day voters”—or “about 17,000 ballots”—that were dropped into secure slots at the tabulators, the statement noted.

 

A bipartisan team of poll workers at each location then brought those boxes, along with results and already counted ballots, to the county’s central elections center

story by @JenAFifield/@VotebeatUS https://t.co/MY04mAlca8

— Arizona Mirror || bsky @azmirror.com (@ArizonaMirror) November 10, 2022

As expected, NBC News downplayed the issue and chose to highlight the words of Maricopa County’s BOS chair:

“Everyone is still getting to vote. No one has been disenfranchised,” Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors and a Republican, told reporters in downtown Phoenix following reports of equipment problems Tuesday morning.

“When we test these machines, that’s part of the process. We go through it for every election,” he added. “And in this particular instance, this is something we didn’t anticipate.”