Maricopa County Made Arizona’s Elections Even More Of A Disaster Than People Realize

After it trained upwards of 50,000 poll watchers, poll workers, and other roles for ongoing citizen engagement in the election process over the year leading up to the 2022 midterms, the Election Integrity Network sent out a survey to its on-the-ground volunteers following Election Day to gauge how things went.

The responses from election workers in key battleground districts and states around the country showed a mostly calm election cycle compared to 2020, with one massive and overwhelming exception. In Maricopa County, Arizona, election workers were appalled and aghast at how things had been run there.

“As soon as we sent the survey out, we were flooded with responses showing that they had no confidence in how the election had been run there,” Executive Director of the Election Integrity Network Marshall Yates told The Federalist.

According to Yates, unlike the rest of the country, where survey respondents espoused general confidence in their respective elections, the responses from Arizona were overwhelming, with Maricopa poll watchers and poll workers saying they had “zero” confidence in the election.

Maricopa, which is home to almost 62 percent of Arizona’s 7.2 million people, was already in the news on Election Day for its hours-long lines and broken machines. After its close and contentious 2020 election, Maricopa County officials refused to cooperate with an audit of the election by state senators and dismissed concerns about how it conducts elections. This year, it took the county just under two full weeks to count ballots.

Election Day workers flooded the survey response team with stories of incompetence, chaos, and mismanagement that resulted in the disenfranchisement of voters.

“The printers were not properly calibrated so the tabulators did not read the ballots and were rejected. Many voters left because of the delays and either did not vote or had to go to other vote centers to vote,” one Maricopa poll observer reported. “Some voters did not want to place rejected ballot into misreads box. Some voting centers may have mixed tabulated ballots with misreads.”

“This was a horrible thing to experience. Poll workers conveyed a shocking lack of competence — it actually looked like willful incompetence,” another said.

Unfortunately, these accounts are among many reported incidents of failed election administration seen throughout Maricopa on Election Day and in the days following. From finicky ballot tabulator machines to probable violations of state law, the seemingly endless slew of problems witnessed by Maricopa residents was a clearcut example of how not to run an election.

A County Filled with Chaos

Unlike most states, where citizens vote at their local neighborhood-based precinct, Arizona allows for its counties to adopt a vote center model, where voters are permitted to cast their ballots at any center within their voting jurisdiction, regardless of their address. Upon arriving at one of these centers, Maricopa voters check in by providing their state-approved ID, at which point a ballot-on-demand printer produces a ballot that is filled out by the voter and run through a vote tabulation machine.