Voters blast Maricopa County board of supervisors over 2022 election, call for nullification and redo with paper ballots

Election was a charade and tainted, speakers said, given that tabulators were malfunctioning in 20% of vote centers and ballots repeatedly rejected

Dozens of people showed up at a meeting of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors in Phoenix on Wednesday and railed against the mismanagement of the 2022 election that included tabulators not working in 20 percent of vote centers — most if not all of them in Republican areas.

“I came here to represent my grandchildren,” said one man. “I don’t want them coming to me and asking, ‘Grandpa, what were you doing when this republic was taken down by corruption and fraud?’”

He said he and his family moved to Arizona from Massachusetts to escape corruption, but that he now feels betrayed and discouraged.

“I feel abandoned by elected officials who can’t screw up the courage to stand against whatever the unseen hand is that’s offering blandishments and threats to our elected officials across this country,” he told the five-member board.

“We are ground zero right here…John Adams said our Constitution was made for a moral people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other. We have an immoral governance here in this county, and you are responsible.”

“I think about where I could move,” he said. “There is no other place. We’re like the forces of Dunkirk. We’re up against the English Channel.”

He ended his comments by warning the board members that there would be investigations into the 2022 election.

“I want you to understand one thing from the Bible: Beware, your sins will find you out,” he said. “There are going to be some serious investigations. I would suggest that you get ahead of the curve, turn yourself over to state’s evidence…and come clean.”

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On Election Day, there were immediate reports of voting machines not working in scores of vote centers, and the Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, said at a press event that 20 percent of all vote centers were affected and that one out of every five ballots weren’t going through.

When election results were released in the days that followed, Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake was behind. And even when the results from Election Day finally came — results expected to be heavily in Lake’s favor as many more Republicans than Democrats voted in-person this year — her numbers were not as high as had been expected.

At the end of the day on Monday, the governor’s race was called for Katie Hobbs, the current Secretary of State, an announcement that left many in the state gasping with disbelief given that Kari Lake had run a high-energy campaign, was well known and liked by voters in the state after having spent more than two decades as a TV broadcaster in Phoenix, and given the sour mood of the country and predictions of a monstrous “red wave.”

Hobbs had refused to debate, and many voters complained that she hadn’t even campaigned.

One of the first people to give public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Nov. 16 was a poll worker who said she almost got escorted out of poll worker training for questioning why they couldn’t ask if someone was bringing in ballots for people other than themselves and their immediate family, which would be illegal under state law.

“I was told, ‘You may not ask. This is our policy. You may not ask,” she said. “I questioned that, and I was told I was being disruptive and almost escorted out of class.”

The woman said she got fired on Election Day when asking why some people whose address had changed were being given a provisional ballot while others were being given a regular ballot.

“I questioned that and the woman from county, I forgot her name, said, ‘No, no, this is how we do it.’”

“I got fired,” she told the board. “When I asked why I got fired, I was told, ‘I didn’t have to have a reason.’”

Another woman who spoke, who identified herself as a fourth-generation Arizonan, said the two people who oversaw the election — Chairman of the Board of Supervisors Bill Gates and the County Recorder, Steven Richer — have lost “all credibility and any shred of integrity” because they opened a political action committee (PAC) in 2021 to defeat MAGA candidates.

“That actually was almost our whole ballot for this primary from the Republican Party,” she said. “So if you think that the public should believe the false narrative of well-run, fair, transparent elections and outcomes, you’re sorely mistaken. That’s not just a conflict of interest. It’s a specific agenda and a pre-bias going into it. So you at the very least should have recused yourselves from any part of this election having open that in 2021.”

“You don’t like people questioning and you want us to have faith: We don’t. There are problems that need to be addressed, systemically addressed.”

Several other Maricopa County residents spoke about what they saw at polling places on Election Day and called for the election to be nullified, and a new election to be held, using paper ballots.

“It needs to be done completely over again,” one man said.

He said he was a school board candidate this year and was campaigning outside of a polling place located in a conservative Christian church in Mesa.

“Within the first half an hour, both the tabulators are down,” he said.

The line quickly grew and after a man came out “hoopin’ and hollerin’,” everybody left, he said.

“That was by design to discourage voters,” he said. “I literally went up to a liberal church two minutes up the road and was out of there in 20 minutes.”

“You’re giving the appearance of fraud. It looks like fraud,” he said. “You must scrub the whole thing. Have a new one. Paper ballots, counted by the end of the day and call it done.”

Another man asked the board to look at the Antrim County case in Michigan, where votes were found to have flipped from the Republican candidate to the Democratic candidate (some say because of machine error, others because of human error).

He asked the board to consider whether the issues in the election didn’t amount to voter suppression given that Republican voters were most affected, as they were much more likely to vote at the vote centers on Election Day, rather than by mail.

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Prior to the Nov. 16 meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, voters in the state had been venting their anger and disbelief on social media pages in huge numbers, with more than 11,000 comments on a post on the Instagram page of Katie Hobbs by Tuesday, most of them negative.

“This woman couldn’t even fill a diner with supporters and somehow I’m supposed to think 1.3 million random people voted for her??” one person wrote.

“Absolutely no one I know voted for you,” another person said.

“How is it exactly that you get to oversee the entire election process and yet you’re also running for Governor. Say it with me folks: Conflict. Of Interest. Katie Hobbs is being INSTALLED as Governor, but there’s not a chance in hall she won any election,” one commenter wrote.

“We really did vote for a female governor, but it wasn’t you,” another person wrote.

Click HERE to watch the full Nov. 16 meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

Click HERE to go to the YouTube channel of Crossroads Report to view more clips of people who spoke during the public comment period.