Voter misinformation contributed to ‘door 3’ numbers, officials say
At least 1,300 ballots placed in “door 3” on Election Day ended up in those secure boxes for reasons besides Maricopa County’s printer issues, election officials say.
Officials believe misinformation around pens and ballot marking may have contributed to tabulators being unable to read those ballots.
Those ballots came in from voters marked in blue ballpoint pen, with check marks, x marks and other ambiguous marks rather than the oval bubble being filled in.
Scott Jarrett (Elections Director) says that the number of ballots landing in secure boxes meant for tabulator misreads is shrinking. This is due to issues with printer settings on Election Day.
He said, “This shows that there are additional reasons why some of those ballots got into the door number 3 that were not related with the printers.”
Of course, printers were a problem.
Maricopa County has printers that produce ballots on-demand at polling stations so voters can vote wherever they are located in the county. Officials determined on Election Day that formatting marks and text on some ballots produced by printers weren’t being printed dark enough for the tabulators to read.
The issues affected about 30% of polling sites and about 6% of the total Election Day ballots cast.
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Officials now realize that some ballots in “door three” have been lost due to printer issues, which has resulted in their initial estimates of only 17,000 ballots being affected.
Some were sent instead to adjudication boards. These review the ballots that cannot be read by tabulators because voters used ballpoint pen to cross out or check out the ballot bubbles.
Jarrett stated that they are bringing their own pens. “And it happens to be a very thin ballpoint pen. It won’t fill in the oval sufficiently or, if they are choosing to vote with checkmarks, then it won’t fill in a sufficient amount of the oval to register as a vote that our tabulator can read.”
Voters should fill out the entire bubble when voting for a candidate.
If they don’t, tabulators may not be able to read the ballot and will spit out the ballot, giving back a “misread” error message. Those who receive that message from poll workers are instructed by the county’s tabulators to ask voters to send back their ballots.
However, due to the chaos of the day some voters chose to incorrectly mark ballots in the “door 3-” box.
Officials called it misinformation contributing to election day turmoil.
Megan Gilbertson, an Elections Department spokesperson said that “that’s why it was so important for voters to have all the information about how they can participate in the election.” “Fortunately, we have all these backup plans to make sure that every voter’s vote gets counted.”
Roughly 1.5 million people voted in the general election in Maricopa County. Nearly 250,000 voted in person on Election Day.
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Misinformation about pen can worsen problems
Maricopa County officials have spoken a lot about pen use.
In particular, they asked voters to use county-issued pen at the polls. Those felt-tip markers dry faster, officials say, which ensures pen ink doesn’t gunk up the on-site tabulators as ballots go through them minutes after being marked.
This time around, the county pens were PaperMate brand felt-tips, similar to previous felt-tip pens provided for voters in past elections.
But some voters eschewed the markers.
A vote center in Sun City West saw a group of Republicans hand out brand-new ballpoints, and officials said people pilfered county-issued pens at least one polling place.
After Gail Golec (a candidate for county supervisor) encouraged voters to bring their blue-ink pen to the polls, pen thefts were first reported in August’s primary.
Golec stated on Twitter that she did this to protect the vote, as county-issued pen “can insert votes that look like felt tip pens.”
As proof, she pointed to a video of a ballot that she said was shown to be altered as it was traced through voting machines in Georgia, as well as claims by Jovan Pulitzer, an inventor and conspiracy theorist who has spread disinformation about the 2020 election.
These claims began to circulate again on social networks in the days before Nov. 8.
The ballpoints might be part of why tabulators couldn’t process ballots filled out incorrectly, Jarrett said.
He explained that felt-tip pens can create thicker lines when a voter crosses or checks off a bubble. This means that tabulators sometimes can still read the marks even though they aren’t all bubbled in.
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But ballpoint pens create narrower, fainter lines, which Jarrett said compounded the issue of voters not marking their ballots correctly.
Had those voters used a felt-tip pen, there would have been a better chance the ballots would have been read by tabulators, he said.
There are more adjudications that normal
When ballots are returned with smudges, bleed throughs, overvotes and marks that can’t be read by tabulators, they have to go through a process known as adjudication.
To determine whether each ballot can be counted, a bipartisan team comprises of adjudicators who examine scans of the marks on each ballot. An electronic overlay shows them what marks are in question on the images, and the team manually creates an computer log of how to resolve each vote.
They also create a handwritten log and compare the two to ensure votes are accurately recorded.
Jarrett explained that “door 3”, incorrectly marked ballots now need to go through this process.
He said that the rates of adjudication are already higher because many write-in candidates ran for races in this election cycle. The tabulators are unable to read handwriting so these ballots will have to be submitted to the bipartisan boards.
The incorrectly marked ballots from the “door 3” box contributed to a “slight delay” as officials processed and counted ballots cast on Tuesday, Jarrett said.
“The day that we had to go through and read in those Election Day ballots (place them in tabulators to be counted), that did slow our boards down a little bit,” Jarrett said.
“That was the day we posted about 75,000 (results), and most of the other days we’ve been now over 80,000.”
Jarrett estimated that approximately 5,000 Election Day ballots remain to be counted. If the trends he’s seeing with incorrectly marked ballots hold, he expects that about 600 of those could go to adjudication boards.
This would make the total number of ballots affected by printer issues on Election Day less than 15,000, without accounting for other reasons. They could also have ended up in “door 3” misreads boxes, which receives some ballots each election because of smudging and small marks.
Sasha Hupka covers Maricopa County and regional issues for The Arizona Republic with a focus on voting and democracy. Have a tip or question about elections? Reach her at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @SashaHupka.