What ‘Purportedly” Caused Arizona’s Mid-Term Election Debacle

The Judge in Kari Lake’s case did not allow the trial to proceed on most of the counts.  He did not care about lack of accurate signature verification, for which Lake’s team submitted evidence, and the Cyber Ninja’s audit conducted after the 2020 election proved conclusively, and he did not care about the fact that Hobbs did not recuse herself from being the party responsible, as Secretary of State, for running the election.  Her being the candidate for Governor did not prohibit her from running her own election in Arizona.  The Judge did not care that Elections Officials were clearly partisan, having created a PAC to defeat MAGA candidates, and having contributed to Democrats and their PACS in the recent past. He also did not care that executives at Runbeck, the company responsible for printing many of the ballots, and for counting the votes, and Runbeck employees, also contributed to these Democratic causes.

Kari Lake’s legal team was restricted by a judge to sampling ballots in a very limited way.  It was a big deal that the judge granted access to ballots at all. The search for bad ballots, among several hundred thousand from over 200 voting centers, evidence of malfeasance, was constrained to one day. Only a fraction of the total collected as suspect was examined closely by Lake’s expert in elections equipment and processes because time ran out. He testified that he found dozens of these 19” ballot images on 20” ballot paper from six different voting centers.  The resulting ballot is one which would pass muster except for the highly trained and experienced eye of an expert.  This is why so many voters filled them out, thinking they were legitimate.

From this expert, we learned that 19” inch versions of the correct 20” ballot were printed by OKI printers(according to the Election Director) at three(if you believe him) or 6+ (if you believe the Lake team) voting centers. We are told by the Election Director that he knew of this problem “a few days after” the election, but that he never reported it to the Maricopa County Supervisors, did not create a Report or even a Memo, and didn’t realize when the Prosecution was asking about “shrink to fit” and 19” ballots being printed on 20” paper on the first day of the trial that they might be referring to the problem he said he and his team had identified in his post-election analysis which he called “Fit to Page.”

There are two ways, apparently, that the wrong size ballot could be introduced into the voting process on election day.  The most obvious one is that someone who wanted to create havoc on election day altered the pdf file used for the election day voting for ballot-on-demand printers and uploaded it to the laptop used to control these OKI devices, replacing the correct pdf file.  According to the Elections Director’s own testimony, someone would have had to do this three times, or possibly more, because three voting centers were affected, and some had multiple printers, each controlled by laptops containing the pdfs. Presumably, this would require Admin access, so there would be a limited number of people who worked for the Elections department with this level of access to make a change to the system. 

This explanation, if found to be the correct one, would be evidence of fraud. It is illegal to change a ballot to be used in an election. Whether this happened can only be determined with access, under subpoena, to the laptops that controlled the printers.  If this happened, by now, the 19” pdf has probably already been swapped for the original, 20” pdf by someone with Admin. Access and the Security Log files which capture ny and all changes made to the system may have been overwritten as well, as they were in 2021 before the Arizona Elections Officials turned over their equipment to Cyber Ninjas after a many months long battle of the attorneys with their subpoenas and appeals.

According to the Elections Director, a “Fit to Page” feature of the OKI ballot-on-demand printers must have been used to reset the ballot vertical dimension in an effort to rectify the printing issues being encountered at 59% of the voting centers(that’s about 120 of them).  These issues that needed Technicians to rectify, involved not enough toner, I heard from voters and voting center volunteers, being applied to the ballots by the printers. Some “heat” adjustments were made, according to the Election Director, by his Technicians, and some shaking of toner cartridges happened, in addition to the “Fit to Page” adjustment. Having done some research on the “Fit to Page” feature for OKI printers, I found out how it works.  What I discovered makes it less likely that this is the valid explanation for what actually happened.

The Technician wanting to change the page image to a different size needs to enter the X- and Y- factors to change the current page size to another.  The 19” image that got printed, when 20” was the original and correct size, would need a Y- factor to be entered of point 95(.95) which is the decimal equivalent of 19/20. We have not heard anything about whether the width of the ballot was altered, but it is safe to assume that any Technician with any knowledge would realize the X- factor would need to be the same as the Y-factor otherwise the ballot image would be totally out of proportion.  

So out of all possible values, we are supposed to believe that multiple Technicians and multiple voting centers entered exactly these values and then did not stick around to see if the ballots they produced would Tabulate correctly. We were told by voters, lawyers who supervised the election, visiting over 100 voting centers that the problems at many locations went on for hours and hours starting early in the morning, and continuing into the mid-afternoon. 

From my reading of the manual, I could not determine whether the decimals would go up or down by .05 or an even smaller increment, say .01.  The smaller the increment, the more options there are for resetting the printer.  We are supposed to believe that one Technician did not pick .98 or .90, but all picked .95 for the Y-factor. For this to have happened, it must have been coordinated between Technicians… “Let’s all try doing this to fix the problem.” There should be text messages as artifacts from such coordination. Did these Technicians have a Supervisor, or did they report directly to the Election Director?  Who were they, and what are their backgrounds?

There should also be documentation from the Technicians of where they went, and what problems they encountered, and what they did in order to try to fix the problems; something like an Incident Report.  It was an election, after all, so these types of attention to details would be important.

Tabulators contain scanners that scan at a fixed dpi, or dots per inch. The change to 19” made the Tabulators reject the ballots, according to the Lake expert, and to the Elections Director, but the ballots were already being rejected, because that is why the Technicians were sent to fix the problems. Such a change (to 19” vertical) effectively gives less info. about what is on the ballot to the Tabulator. Any trained Technician should know that this change to printer settings would make the problem WORSE.

If a vertical inch is sampled at the rate of 300 dpi, then reducing that inch to .95 times it’s former self would reduce the data available to determine what is on the ballot.

At all these centers, Tabulators were rejecting ballots, so after multiple attempts to feed the ballots, voters were told to spoil their ballot and go to another voting center, or they were told they could place their uncounted ballot into Door 3.  There was an issue raised about whether these voters could actually vote elsewhere, because unless they were properly “checked out” they would go elsewhere and not be permitted to vote because they “purportedly” already voted. The ballots they put into Drawer 3 would all be rejected at “central count” because the Tabulators all work the same way looking for a 20” ballot image to successfully process the ballot. The Elections Department could provide no information on how many of these Drawer 3 ballots there were.  They did not count them at the voting centers, but they gave them to a third party to transport.  The company that transported them did not count them either. They were given to Runbeck to Tabulate. But of course, they would not Tabulate, being illegitimate, so they would be “duplicated.” to make them into 20” ballots and then they would be Tabulated…at least probably.

So, to review.  Over 50 printers malfunctioned on election day. If you think the probability of one of them going off is about 1/100, then the probability of this many going off is 1/100 to the power of 50.

Recall that all printers and all other equipment functioned fine for the 20 voting days prior to election day. This probability is one in a duotrigintillion (I looked it up). As a math major at U.C. Berkeley, I’ve never heard of such a large number.

Now multiply this by the likelihood(a.k.a. probability) that several different Technicians all made the same change to the printer settings (one that would make things worse…and one that required the exact value of point 95 be entered as the Y-factor), even though the election was ALL conducted using 20” ballots on 20” ballot paper. You see that mathematics cannot quantify the probability of both of these events occurring on election day as we are supposed to believe they did.

This article mainly addresses the 19” ballot image on 20” ballot paper issue.  The other count on which the Judge allowed the Lake team to proceed to trial concerned lack of “Chain of Custody” and the Maricopa Election Officials failure to follow Arizona law regarding it. That is another matter altogether, but the Lake team demonstrated that laws were broken in several regards, and they submitted affidavits from witnesses to prove it.  The Judge seemed to ignore this problem in his ruling against Lake.