Dozens of laser printers malfunctioned during in-person voting in Maricopa County on Nov. 8, causing confusion for voters at roughly one-third of the county’s 223 voting centers. Multiple factors came it play, including overweight paper, improper settings, and probable overuse – all of which point to questionable management by county officials, according to election observers.
Almost 250,000 voters in Maricopa County opted to go in-person to cast their ballots on Election Day. They could choose from any of the county’s voting centers where two or three printers were set up to provide a “print-on-demand” ballot customized for each voter.
Voters were to the place their completed ballots in an on-site tabulator to be scanned, but reports of sporadic rejection of ballots began shortly after voting started at 6 a.m. The problems continued throughout the day, causing chaos for at least 15,400 voters who could not get their ballot scanned by a tabulator.
Several hours later Maricopa County IT staffers had a fix for the problem, which was caused by toner (ink) which insufficiently melded on the ballot paper. This caused the timing marks printed on each ballot to be too light for the tabulators to read.
Timing marks are critical for an accurate vote count, as the tabulators use those marks to align ballots so the optical scanners know where to look for the filled in ovals. Some of the tabulators were also reportedly impacted by “flaking” caused by toner dust that was not sufficiently affixed to the ballot.
Maricopa County says two types of printers were utilized on Election Day, but only one -the OKI B432 LED- had problems. Those printers, according to OKI specifications, should be used for paper weighing between 60 to 120 grams per square meter when double-sided printing is involved. That means no more than 80- pound paper.
However, Maricopa County’s two-sided ballots in the 2022 election cycle were printed on 100-pound paper, officials say. Those same officials insisted as recently as last week that tests of the printers prior to Election Day with the 100-pound paper provided no indication of a problem.
Additional testing under “stress” conditions after the election also failed to replicate the too-light timing mark problem, according to a county spokesperson.
If the paper on its own did not cause the bad timing marks and toner flaking, then the OKI printers themselves may have played a part.
Those printers, which have an estimated lifespan of 100,000 one-sided, 8.5-inch pages, were purchased by the county in 2017 and 2018. They were used with no reported issues during the 2020 election cycle when 80-pound paper was used for the ballots.
And they were used for the 2022 primary election in August, during which less than 107,000 ballots had to be printed for in-person voters. All of those ballots were only one-sided.
But those OKI printers did not simply go into storage in between elections. Instead, elections officials acknowledge some printers were put into service to print the envelopes the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office used to mail early ballots to some voters.
There was then a large turnout on Election Day for in-person voting on Nov. 8. Those ballots were two-sided on 20-inch long paper, which has drawn attention to the printer’s fuser.
The fuser is a critical component of the printer, generating high temperatures via a heating element or light to fuse or attach the toner particles (ink) to the paper while applying pressure to bind the particles. Those fusers may not have heated correctly, either due to age or some other issue.
One such issue is the unusually cold overnight temperatures experienced across Maricopa County in the days before voting began. If the printers and additional toner units were left in unheated warehouses or trucks pending setup then the toner particles could have settled or even coalesced, making it harder for the fuser to due its job.
Critics point out that any answers to what happened on Election Day does not change the fact that thousands of voters were left with no option other than put their cast ballots inside a special section of the tabulator in what is known as “Door 3” for tabulation later at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTC).
Which raises the question of why those Door 3 ballots could be read by the main tabulators at MCTEC but not at various voting centers. The election challenge lawsuit filed last week by Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh could lead to more details about that issue.
In addition, Maricopa County’s printer problems are expected to lead to new legislation to mandate better record keeping and testing of ballot printers.