An affidavit from Mark Finchem’s lawsuit states that the Maricopa County printer issues on Election Day couldn’t have been accidental.
While Maricopa County released a report on the election failures of the 2022 elections, Arizona election lawsuits continue as 2022 GOP nominees Kari Lake and Mark Finchem file motions for reconsideration in their respective races for governor and secretary of state.
According to the report, the county expanded the length of the ballots from 19 inches during the primary election to 20 inches in the general election in order to include all of the required information. The increased ballot size in combination with the use of 100-pound ballot paper, the report concludes, was too great a strain on some older printers that were used.
Regarding the issue of ballots being printed for 19-inch paper rather than 20-inch, the report concluded that “ballots were re-sized as ‘fit to page,’ a process that entirely changed the location of the timing marks on the ballots and assured that neither the on-site tabulators nor the central count tabulators could read the ballots.”
It couldn’t be determined whether the reason for this change was “from a technician attempting to correct the printing issues … or a problem internal to the printers,” according to the report. However, during the investigators’ “testing, four printers randomly printed one or a few ‘fit to page’ ballots in the middle of printing a batch of ballots. None of the technical people with whom we spoke could explain how or why that error occurred.”
These and other failures that marred the November election prompted Lake’s election lawsuit, which she originally filed in December.
Lake, the Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee, fell about 17,000 votes short in the 2022 election. She is suing current Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and Maricopa County election officials and is requesting that the election results be invalidated or that she be declared the winner.
Lake’s case was reviewed by the Arizona Supreme Court, which remanded one of her seven counts to trial court and allowed sanctions against her to be considered.
A legitimate re-election is in order, the sooner the better