Pressure grows on Maricopa County to redo election with letter from Attorney General

'Election Integrity Unit' of AG's office says it looks like Maricopa broke election laws, didn't count 1700 Door 3 ballots from a single vote center(?!) and demands answers to questions before Nov. 28

It’s looking more and more likely that Maricopa County will have no choice but to redo the 2022 election.

On Saturday, the Arizona Attorney General’s office’s sent a four-page letter to Maricopa County saying it appears the county violated numerous state election laws and demanding answers to several questions before the county attempts to certify its election and send election results to the Secretary of State’s office on Nov. 28.

The letter came from the state Attorney General’s “Election Integrity Unit.”

In the letter, Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright says the office has received “hundreds” of complaints about the election and that these complaints “go beyond pure speculation” and include “first-hand witness accounts that raise concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with election law.”

It goes on to say that statements by both the county recorder, Stephen Richer, and the chair of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, appear to confirm these potential violations of law.

The letter reiterates what the county has acknowledged — that at least 60 of the 223 vote centers in the county had issues on Election Day with the printers that printed ballots, with printer settings that were not uniform, resulting in ballots that were rejected by the tabulators.

The ballot printers had been tested the day before the election, Wright notes, and there were no problems.

But on Election Day, within the first 30 minutes of the polls opening at 6 a.m., the tabulators at dozens of vote centers began spitting ballots back out, unable to read them.

A footnote on the first page of the letter notes that both state and federal law require that elections be administered in a “uniform” way.

“While this cannot always be perfectly achieved between counties that utilize different election equipment, within a county such uniformity is not only presumed, but mandatory,” it says.

It was widely reported that the tabulator breakdowns, which resulted in long lines and frustrated voters, ONLY seemed to occur in Republican areas.

And the letter makes clear that the issues were ONLY on Election Day, when more Republicans were voting, and not during the early voting period, when more Democrats voted.

In Arizona, the majority of voters vote by mail in every election, but this year, following the advice of people like Steve Bannon and Mike Lindell, many Republicans showed up to vote in person instead, believing their vote would be more secure and more likely to count than if sent by mail.

But there were almost immediate reports on Election Day of tabulators unable to read ballots, and voters instructed to instead deposit ballots in a slot in front of the machines to be tabulated later. Thousands of voters are thought to have left, instead, and traveled to other vote centers to vote, or to have just given up on voting and gone to work.

In the letter, the attorney general’s office requests detailed information about the printer issue, including a log of the changes made to the printer configuration settings and the names of everyone who made them.

The letter also takes Gates to task for saying that voters who had signed in at a vote center but could not cast a vote because the tabulators weren’t working could “check out” of that vote center and go to another one when poll workers said they had not been trained how to check someone out in the electronic poll book.

But most interesting is a passage in the letter that refers to a sworn complaint from an election observer who said that “more than 1700 ‘Door 3’ non-tabulated ballots from one voting location were placed in black duffle bags that were intended to be used for tabulated ballots.”

If placed in the same bags as ballots that had already been tabulated, then those 1700 ballots presumably would not have been counted.

If this happened at many of the other 60 vote centers where tabulators weren’t working and ballots got deposited into Door 3 slots, the number of potentially uncounted ballots could easily be in the tens of thousands.

Maricopa County is the most populous county in Arizona, by far, with more than 4.4 million people — more than 60 percent of the population of the state.

It includes the state capital, Phoenix, plus Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe and Chandler.

Though the county has 100,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, somehow got 37,950 fewer votes than Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs, according to the latest numbers.

The latest numbers, released by the county on Saturday, show Hobbs with 789,784 votes to 751,834 for Lake. The race was called for Hobbs on Monday.

In the state as a whole, the latest update shows Kari Lake down by just 17,428 votes with 1,269,894 total votes, compared to 1,287,322 for Hobbs.