The Ballots of Maricopa County

A couple of things

First, a common perception of elections is entangled with the misty notions of a vindication of democracy, alternatively there is also the view of annoying process of choosing the lesser of two evils. However it is also an operational process similar to many others; composed of discrete elements (voter registration, polling station management, voting counting) that must work correctly within in a series of dependencies and certain time periods, If that operational process is riddled with problems, then you are going to have a hard time having people accept the final product (an election outcome).

Second, a guiding principle of organizational analysis is a form of “revealed preference”; if you want to know what an organization values look at what it actually does as opposed to what it says.

Let’s turn to the example of my home county, Maricopa. It comprises more than 60% of Arizona’s population, it’s the third largest voting jurisdiction in the country, and may decide the outcome of the presidential election; the swingiest county on one of the swingiest states in the country. Election officials there predict that it may take nearly two weeks to count all the ballots Why? Late-arriving mail ballots, changes in the electoral laws that add a few hours to the process, a two-page long ballots are being blamed as the culprits.

Despite what you may read, this isn’t an unusual situation for Maricopa. In 2022 two days after the election, it still had 26% of its ballots to count. Over the past 20 years, the length of time it has taken Maricopa to count ballots have ranged from 10 to 17 days. So this is an accepted feature of how Maricopa conducts elections

By contrast in Florida, by state law, counties need to finish counting early ballots (with few exceptions) by 7:00 PM the day before the election with results posted when the polls close. Yes Maricopa has different challenges than Florida, specifically the flood of mail-in ballots close to Election Day, but Florida prioritizes timely vote counts while the past 20 years shows that Maricopa (and Arizona) does not.

You don’t need to have a Six Sigma Black Belt to know the value of benchmarks.

The problems with Maricopa and its elections are actually deeper than just slow counting. Maricopa has a system of “voting centers” which allow residents to vote at any one of the 200+ polling location on Election Day instead of only at a designated precinct site. Of course such a change has its own operational challenges. Due to the large number of different races in the County, it’s not possible to stock pre-printed ballots at each center and on-demand printing technology needs to be used (BOD). In addition, poll books need to be digitized and accessible from each center. Each of these steps introduces an additional opportunity for error in the process.

So what happened during the general election in 2022? Chaos. Votes tabulators at 1/3 of all county vote centers failed to read completed ballots, voters who were sent to other centers to complete the process were not properly “checked out” of the original center and were thus unable to vote at the new center (if they bothered to wait in line again), and an ad hoc measure of creating a “Door 3” for untabulated ballots so that they could be segregated and later verified led instead to the mixing of thousands of those problematic ballots with those already voided.

What happened afterwards was almost as bad.

There was an investigation commissioned, after all not only was this a nationally-reported disaster but one that had it occurred say in Mississippi, would have been considered a case of voter suppression. The investigation was led by former chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, Ruth McGregor and was completed in April 2023. The resulting report focused on the technical issues involved in the on-demand printing of ballots (BOD)

This is a whitewash because the primary problem was not technical, that problem was only the most proximate one, but rather one of operational mismanagement. The focus should have been, given the technical demands of the voting center system, why proper testing and/or standardization was not performed that allowed faulty printers to be placed in the centers in the first place. The second operational issue was the lack of standardized procedures and staff training to handle potential problems during the voting process. Poll workers were not properly trained or supervised to either handle “check-out” procedures which would have allowed voters to cast ballots at another center or in the proper transport of untabulated (Door 3) ballots.

The staff training issues are the most egregious because from an operational perspective, while there are unique technical and operational issues in the Maricopa voting center process the problems that happened on Election Day could have been mitigated by proper staff training procedures for handling an existing piece of technology, vote tabulators. The McGregor Report was misleading because it was focused on investigating a technical issue when in reality the problems were operational in nature and stemmed from managerial incompetence

I should add that this is not to cast aspersions on Justice McGregor, you can only investigate according to the scope with which you have been charged. Rather the focus goes to various Maricopa County elected officials who commissioned the investigation and received her report.

Perhaps the most insulting of those elected officials was Supervisor Bill Gates who stated:

“Continuous improvement is what we do at Maricopa County, so I welcome this report,.. It shows that two things can be true at the same time: our elections team prepared well for the 2022 General Election and had every reason to trust our procedures and equipment.”

Continuous improvement? This was an election where voters were denied the ability to cast a ballot in a gubernatorial race that was decided by 17,000 ballots. Voters who waited in lines for upwards of an hour were denied the ability to vote, were sent to other polling places where (if they even bothered to travel to and wait in line again) they often were denied the ability to vote, and then provisional ballots were not counted. Continuous improvement? That’s a term you use for a county road project or for residential trash collection not for a core function of American democracy that we have been doing for nearly 400 years.

Of course you can skate on this when the Arizona political and media establishment is united against the losing gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, dismissing her claims as election denialism. From the way the County reacted to the events of the 2022 Election, does anybody think they value the proper conduct of elections?

Need I say that all of the relevant county elected officials from 2022, included Bill Gates, are still in office for the 2024 election?

How confident are you of Maricopa County in how they will conduct the election in 2024?

Back to what I said earlier regarding if you want to know what an organization values look at what it actually does as opposed to what it says.

Oh just in case you want to go to Arizona and protest this, they already have a narrative waiting for you.

Leave a Comment