Poll watcher tells Maricopa County of 200 mystery ballots at her vote center on Election Day: 200 more ballots than voters!

Was Door No. 3 the means by which extra votes for Democratic candidates were inserted into the vote totals in Maricopa County?

A woman who was a poll watcher in Maricopa County on Election Day told the county’s Board of Supervisors this week that there were 200 extra ballots at the vote center where she worked — ballots that were included in the final count at the end of the day but were not connected to any voters who came in that day and voted.

The woman identified herself as Sarah O’Neil and said she was a poll watcher at a vote center on Election Day. Poll watchers are volunteers, usually connected with a campaign or a political party, who observe the conduct of an election.

“The Door No. 3 debacle,…When I checked in, I was the afternoon, evening and closing poll watcher,” she said.

“I did confirm that our tabulators were cleared. They were all zeros. But I also did confirm that there was no instruction for inspecting to ensure the Door 3 or the Slot 3 was empty. So no one, not a poll worker, not a poll watcher, inspected to make sure it was empty. And the reason that’s a point is at the end of the day, we were asked to report the number of voters checked in, the number of ballots that were transporting, and of those number of ballots, how many were Door No. 3.”

“We had 1,218 ballots. We had only 1,018 voters that checked in. And we had, of those 1,218 ballots, 406 were Door No. 3.”

Door No. 3 is the name that was given to the slot in the tabulators at vote centers, into which voters were instructed to put their ballots if the tabulator scanners rejected them.

Steven Richer, the Maricopa County Recorder, and Bill Gates, the chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors, show the media the tabulators used on Election Day, with Door No. 3 in front. (screenshot)

The chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, had announced on Election Day that 20 percent of the 223 vote centers in Maricopa County were having problems with at least some tabulators rejecting ballots when voters tried to insert them to be scanned.

But this week, Rasmussen Reports reported that it was a much larger number — that 48 percent of the 223 vote centers had been affected.

Rasmussen Reports @Rasmussen_Poll

Update: New - 48% of Maricopa election centers had printer or tabulator malfunctions on election day, not the previously estimated 20%. And no such widespread issues were reported during the early voting period that preceded election day and used the very same equipment. Wow.

Rasmussen Reports @Rasmussen_Poll

Good Morning ! Witness for yourself a secure, fair, honest and completely non-discriminatory election day in Maricopa County, Arizona. https://t.co/VPWPQ8NK5J

The information from the poll watcher seems to indicate that the 200 extra ballots could have come from Door No. 3, and could have been placed there by someone.

“The discrepancy in the number of physical ballots that I had, they came from somewhere,” she told the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. “We physically had them. They were not voters that walked in and checked in. We had 200 more ballots than voters that checked in.”

There was an audible murmur from the people in the room as she said this.

Understandably.

If not from Door No. 3, where did the 200 ballots come from?

I left a message with the communications director for Maricopa County — Megan Gilbertson, posing this question — and am waiting to hear back. I also sent an email to Gilbertson and to the email address for the county’s media department, asking for a response by 5 p.m. today.

The 200 extra ballots added 20 percent to the total number of ballots at that one vote center on Election Day.

If 48 percent of vote centers were affected by tabulator malfunctions and had voters put their ballots in Door No. 3, and if 20 percent more ballots were added at all of them, this could easily amount to more than 20,000 extra ballots — just in Maricopa County.

The latest vote count from Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state, shows Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake trailing Katie Hobbs, the Democrat, by 37,501 votes — with Hobbs getting 787,402 votes and Lake 749,901.

The race was called for Hobbs on Monday night.

The Republican candidate for State Treasurer, incumbent Kimberly Yee, won re-election with 55 percent of the vote, getting 827,147 votes compared to 665,574 for Democratic challenger Martin Quezada.

Maricopa County is still a red county by voter registration — and it’s not even close. There are 113,00 more registered Republicans than Democrats.

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Maricopa County Voter Registration, as of 11/16/2022:

857,060 Republicans

743,714 Democrats

20,624 Libertarians

860,443 Other

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2,481,841 Total

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According to a press release Maricopa County sent out Thursday, 99.5 percent of all ballots have been counted, with just 3,000-8,000 outstanding, including about 2,900 Election Day ballots.