Opinion
By Anonymous Actual Maricopa County, AZ Poll Worker, 11-9-22
I worked as a poll worker in Maricopa for Tuesday’s election. It was a total disgrace. I would guess that 80% of the voters at our polling center were GOP (they were carrying their GOP-provided “Golden Ticket” voter recommendations). They stood in line for 4-5 hours–many with young children–to feed their completed ballots into the tabulator machines. Every once in a while a cheer would ring out around the machines as a lucky voter’s ballot was actually accepted. Voters were convinced that if they allowed their ballot to be inserted into the infamous Slot #3 it would never be counted (and who knows?). Stephen Richer the Maricopa County Recorder said yesterday that “maybe one out of five ballots were rejected.” That was total BS. At our location we went for 8 hours with virtually EVERY SINGLE BALLOT being rejected. Many voters had to give up and return to work, to pick up their kids at school, to get on with their life.
The last voter left the polling place just before 10 PM whereupon we began counting the “misread,” spoiled, and provisional ballots. The polling place Inspector (the head honcho) was unable to get the tabulator machines to print out the results reports (these are like a retail store’s cash register roll). Once all the ballots, reports (finally), and checklist items were boxes and bagged, I volunteered to drive the ballots to an intermediary collection point. A Dem and I drove to a dark parking lot where several Maricopa County Sheriffs were on guard. The folks there transferred the ballots to a large truck and gave us both chain of custody receipts. We returned to the polling place to finish the night at 12:15 AM.
Random Thoughts: 1) the printers and tabulators were tested during the Monday 11/7 polling place set up. They all worked on Monday but immediately began failing on Tuesday morning. Anyone else wonder how that happened? 2) How did this phenomenon occur simultaneously across 20% of the voting locations on the day that was expected to be a very heavy GOP Election Day vote? 3) Why shouldn’t Katie Hobbs have recused herself from the management of an election in which she had a direct personal interest? 4) Why hasn’t Katie Hobbs resigned in disgrace yet this morning?
The entire election process in Maricopa County and AZ in general is a f**ked up mess. From 6 AM until 7 PM it was my job to check in voters and verify their identification (a new AZ law this year). By now, you will not find it surprising that the voter rolls were quite dirty. Examples: “I changed my information on line, why don’t you have my address?” “I registered to vote but never got a new voter registration card” “I changed all my address info at the AZ MVD (DMV) and printed out the screen shots” (but their ADOT account still showed the old information so they had to vote provisionally).
If Dem candidate for Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes becomes AZ’s new Secretary of State, I will certainly never again volunteer to work the elections. In Maricopa County in 2020 Fontes ignored AZ law and allowed 20,000 late “discovered” ballots to be counted (in addition to other lawless acts). My career in implementing large real time information systems implementations tells me that this mess of shite data cleansing, process chaos has to be the way it is for a reason–a bad reason. Anyone who rolled out such an expensive, flawed, and chaotic abomination in the private sector would be fired on the spot and walked off the premises. In fact, it is tempting to resign as a GOP precinct committeeman and reclaim hundreds of hours of my personal time. America has spoken. My fellow Americans are fine with what the Dems and RINOs have served up for the past six years–and especially the last two. The saying, “You can’t cheat an honest man” comes to my mind this morning. The fact that the brain dead and deeply corrupt were not unceremoniously thrown out of power tells me a lot about my fellow Americans–and the future.
The author is verified, civically active in AZ and personally known by our Publisher for over 30 years. Author did not specify brand of tabulators.
Received this message from author 11-11-22:
Hi George,
The tabulators we used at our polling place were made by Dominion. I did not take a picture of the model number…
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
