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 an 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, vote counting) that must work correctly within 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, and a two-pages-long ballot 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 has 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 on 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 show 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 locations on Election Day, instead of only at designated precinct sites. Of course such a system 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 into the process.

So what happened during the general election in 2022? Chaos. Vote 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 their original centers and were thus unable to vote at the new centers (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 ballots that were already voided.

What happened afterwards was almost as bad.

An investigation was 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 a 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 was a whitewash, because the primary problem was not technical — the technical problem was only the most proximate one — but rather one of operational mismanagement. The focus, given the technical demands of the voting-center system, should have been on why proper testing and/or standardization was not performed, leading to the placement of faulty printers in the voting centers. 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, either to handle “check-out” procedures (which would have allowed voters to cast ballots at other voting centers if needed) 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 ballots in a gubernatorial race that was decided by 17,000 votes. 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 and wait in line again — they often were denied the opportunity to vote, and then their 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: 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 the way they do elections, they already have a narrative waiting for you.