Poll Worker Gives An Inside Look At ‘Complete Chaos’ In Maricopa County On Election Day

Heading into Election Day 2022, Maricopa County election worker Erin Smith was feeling cautiously optimistic about the administration of Arizona’s elections. With a motivated team of fellow election workers from all political backgrounds, a smoothly run election seemed like a real possibility.

But nothing could prepare Smith for what happened on Election Day.

“I was in Ukraine in March within a week of the war starting and … at no point was it ever as overwhelming as it was on Election Day in Maricopa,” Smith told The Federalist.

Within hours of polls opening in Arizona, election workers at roughly 30 percent of Maricopa’s voting centers began reporting that their respective vote tabulation machines were rejecting voters’ ballots, leading to long waiting lines and widespread confusion among voters and poll workers alike. While county officials ultimately determined the source of the problem to be misconfigured ballot printer settings, the chaos had already been set in stone.

“The energy instantly changed when the tabulators [stopped] working,” said Smith, who served as a troubleshooter for three of Maricopa’s voting centers. “[Voters were] righteously mad … it was just complete chaos.”

With so many voting centers experiencing the same issue, Maricopa Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates told voters that they had the option of traveling to another voting center to cast their ballot. Due to the unfamiliarity among voters and election workers with the proper “check out” procedures, however, many voters who left their original centers did so without properly checking out and were informed upon arriving at another voting location that the county’s e-Pollbook system had classified them as having already voted.

“Voters this cycle have in fact been disenfranchised,” a purported Maricopa poll worker said during a county Board of Supervisors meeting on Monday. “They [were] told they can’t check in because they weren’t able to properly check out at the previous polling center they were at.”

“We as poll workers were not taught how to check out voters,” he added.

Maricopa Poll Worker CONFIRMS: Poll Workers WERE NOT trained properly, voters were 100% disenfranchised.

“Every single one of us who’s a poll worker right now is making fun of you” pic.twitter.com/HjXrWM50Bx

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) November 28, 2022

With so many finicky tabulators, Gates and County Recorder Stephen Richer also gave Maricopa voters the option of placing their non-tabulated ballots in a bin called “Door 3,” which would be taken to the county’s central counting center after polls closed to be tallied. Due to the tabulator problems, however, some of the bins storing the non-tabulated Door 3 ballots began to overflow.

As a proposed solution, county officials sent out an email to election workers around 3:30 p.m. on Election Day with instructions to designate one of their on-hand, black zipper bags — which are normally used to transport already-tabulated votes — as a “misread ballot” bag to store the Door 3 ballots until they could be moved and counted after polls closed. But once again, anarchy ensued when the convoluted