According to an internal review by Maricopa County, they claim that the main cause of the Election Day problems was the malfunctioning of the OKI ballot-on-demand printers at many of the 223 vote centers. But OKI has fired back, pointing out that the staff didn't bother reading the printer manual. They apparently tried to force heavy paper through the printers, which the machines couldn't handle, resulting in the malfunction.
From Western Journal:
The county’s 2022 General Election Internal Review findings regarding the OKI printer problems mirror what former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Ruth McGregor concluded in a report she submitted to the county in April.
VoteBeat’s Jen Fifield reported McGregor had been hired by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to conduct an independent review of what happened on Election Day.
“Based on our tests, and for the reasons described in this report, we concluded that the combined effect of using 100-pound ballot paper and a 20-inch ballot during the 2022 general election was to require that the Oki B432 printers perform at the extreme edge of their capability, a level that could not be reliably sustained by a substantial number of printers,” the McGregor report said.
OKI responded to the report in a May letter to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, writing, “OKI was disappointed that we were not contacted during the investigation, or prior to the public release of the report, to provide our input and feedback regarding the printers’ performance during the election.”
“We strongly believe that common sense and reason dictated that, during the investigation, the investigation team should have requested an interview from the manufacturer to address the alleged printer performance failures by that manufacturer’s printers,” the letter continued.
OKI took issue with the following statement from McGregor report: “Despite the assurances of the manufacturer, many of the Oki B432 printers were not capable of reliably printing 20-inch ballots on 100-pound paper under election-day conditions.”
OKI explained that its manual clearly states the printer, as it was configured on Election Day, would only work for up to 80-pound paper. Therefore, the 100-pound paper the county utilized on Nov. 8 was “well out of spec for both the multipurpose tray and cassettes.”
The letter continued, “As a result, it seems that the true underlying cause of the election issues was human error in the use of 100 lb. paper without reviewing the manual and/or confirming with OKI that such use was within the specifications of the OKI B432 printers.”
To add insult to injury, OKI disclosed that the so-called investigators never bothered reaching out to the company for feedback on their printers.
Honestly, it's not even a big surprise. The folks running our polls are just so incompetent that we'd probably be better off having 5th graders in charge at this point.
