Trump Campaign Claims Unlawful Video Captures Poll Worker Having Trouble With Tabulation Machine In Maricopa County

Judge Order Redaction of Voters’ Data To Protect Against ID Theft

election office
Maricopa County has been at the center of controversy in the General Election. [Photo courtesy Maricopa County Elections Department]

Maricopa County voters and elections workers who are called to testify about problems with Election Day tabulation machines will not have to worry about their social security numbers, dates of birth, and signatures being made public in the election challenge filed by Donald J. Trump For President, Inc., a judge ruled Tuesday.

Judge Daniel Kiley of the Maricopa County Superior Court granted a protective order requested by attorneys for Trump’s reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee, and the Arizona Republican Party to redact personal identifying data from any documents admitted as evidence at an evidentiary hearing scheduled for Thursday.

Kiley agreed redaction was appropriate to protect any witnesses or voters from possible identify theft given that evidence presented at the hearing is considered a public record. However, the judge ruled that the originals of those documents will remain unredacted when exchanged between the parties.

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One issue Kiley did not rule on during Tuesday morning’s hearing is whether a video should be sealed which purportedly shows a Maricopa County election worker having difficulty getting a voter’s ballot to be read by a tabulation machine. The video captured images of several people in a voting center who should be accorded privacy, Trump campaign attorney Kory Langhofer argued to the judge.

One issue with the video is that state law prohibits such filming within a voting center. That means the video could be evidence of a criminal misdemeanor offense, which is why Thomas Liddy of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office would not agree to it being sealed, he told Kiley.

A ruling on the video will be made on Thursday if the plaintiffs move to admit it into evidence, the judge said.

The lawsuit names Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes as defendants, along with Maricopa County’s board of supervisors. Thursday’s hearing will allow the Trump-Republican plaintiffs to present evidence and question county elections officials under oath about concerns that some poll workers may have inadvertently or intentionally caused ballots cast on Election Day to go uncounted in the race for president.

There were hundreds of complaints filed shortly after the polls closed about voters and elections workers having trouble getting ballots read by the electronic tabulation machines used throughout the county. Those errors primarily dealt with overvotes, which occur when a voter fills in more ovals in a specific contest than allowed.

For instance, only one oval can be filled in for the Presidential Electors; if the tabulation machine reads more than one oval it will flag the ballot.

The proper procedure, according to the Trump-Republican plaintiffs, is for an overvoted ballot to be segregated for a manual review to discern the voter’s intent. That allows the vote to be counted. But the plaintiffs contend some poll workers did not follow that procedure, causing the machines to ignore any overvoted race with no further review.

Many Maricopa County voters believe the overvote problem was caused by elections officials requiring in-person voters to use a Sharpie pen to complete their ballot, which were then misread or could not be read properly by the county’s new tabulation machines.

Riley has also granted the Arizona Democratic Party status as an intervenor in the case. The Democrats’ position is that the Trump campaign and Republican groups are simply seeking “to create confusion and undermine confidence in the validity of the 2020 general election.”