Within an hour of polls opening, poll watchers were reporting issues with voting tabulators not working properly in Maricopa County. Elections officials are able to read ballots, albeit at slower paces.
“We’ve got about 20% of the locations out there where there’s an issue with the tabulator where some of the people who have voted with them, they try and run them through the tabulator, and they’re not going through,” said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates. “We’re trying to fix this problem as quickly as possible, and we also have a redundancy in place. If you can’t put the ballot in the tabulator, then you can simply place it here where you see the number three.”
County Recorder Steven Richer said those ballots would be treated similarly to early ballot voting.
“Once we get your ballot back and signature-verified it, we would send it to our central tabulators,” Richer said. “Ballots that are in
are already signature verified, so we won’t need to confirm identity, but we will central tabulate them.”Maricopa County, Arizona’s most-populated, has 220 voting centers. Gates said voters should choose another voting center if a location was experiencing a long backup.
“If you would prefer to go to another location, you can do that. It doesn’t matter where you go. As long as you’re a registered voter here in Maricopa County.”
Maricopa County was the scene of a drawn-out review of ballots in 2020 after President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump, sending the state’s 11 electoral votes to the Democratic candidate for the first time since Bill Clinton’s re-election bid.
Republished with the permission of The Center Square.
