What is left to be said about vote-counting machines that hasn’t already been said 1000 times? How about that they take up a huge amount of time and resources and focus?
We have new data about officials in Maricopa Co. AZ that shows elections officials spent a large amount of hours preparing machines to count ballots and verifying human signatures- and were completely faulty.
Now public officials are lying to cover up all kinds of mistakes and likely corrupt intentions about using machines in the AZ Governor race.
From the Recycler:
“If last November’s US elections were not contentious enough, OKI found themselves receiving an adverse report from Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which investigated printer issues related to the November 2022 general election.
In the November 2022 elections, Maricopa County (Arizona) vote centres encountered numerous problems that prevented the tabulation of produced ballots by on-site tabulators. The failure was attributed to a failure of the printer fuser to maintain a heat sufficient to fuse the toner onto the paper, making the ballot papers unreadable to the vote tabulators.
Following the election, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office appointed an external person to investigate the election printer issues, and the report was released on the 10th of April 2023.”
The article went on:
“OKI was not contacted,” said Oki in a statement issued on their website. Not “by Maricopa County officials, investigation teams working on their behalf, election services providers, or any other parties associated with the investigation at any time during the investigation. In fact, OKI was completely unaware that an investigation was underway.”
The report states, “The County made significant investments to upgrade its BOD printer fleet. In 2017, the County had acquired commercial off the shelf Oki B432 printers to use with the Oki 9650 BOD printers. In 2020, the County retrofitted the Oki B432 printers, which previously printed only voter envelopes, to function as BOD [ballot on demand] printers, capable of printing ballots, control slips, and envelopes. In 2021, the County replaced two older BOD printer models, the Oki 9650 and the Lexmark 923, with Lexmark C4150 printers.”
The voting paper in question was 100lb (150gsm) and 20 inches (51.8cm) long, and the failure was attributed to a failure of the printer fuser to maintain a heat sufficient to fuse the toner onto the paper, making the ballot papers unreadable to the vote tabulators.
The Maricopa County report is 33 pages long and is very detailed. In their statement, OKI said they would not respond to each issue raised in the report but would like to respond to three specific statements which are factually inaccurate. We believe that all of these inaccuracies would have been avoided had the investigatory team simply contacted OKI in advance of the report’s release.
Factual Errors:
Page 24– Fuser replacement
Report statement: “The fuser inadequacy on some printers is not a problem easily remedied, as the fuser on the Oki B432 cannot be separately replaced.”
OKI’s response: The fuser for the B432 is in fact available for replacement and can be changed onsite by a printer technician. The printer itself does not need to be replaced in the event that the fuser fails.
Page 24 – Product support period
Report statement: “That problem [alleged inability to separately replace the fuser] is further exacerbated by the fact that the Oki B432 manufacturer, which has withdrawn from the North and South American markets, has established December 31, 2025 as the end of life for these printers, after which repair parts and consumables will no longer be manufactured.”
OKI’s response: Not only is the statement about fuser replacement inaccurate, the time horizon for service/support noted in the report is incorrect.
OKI discontinued sales of OKI- branded printers in March 2021. OKI will abide by our legal obligations to support printers in the field with consumables and spare parts for a minimum of (5) years after product discontinuation. In the specific case of the B432 model, OKI will continue to supply consumables and spare parts for this model through at least March 31, 2028.
Page 26 – Purported “Assurances” from the manufacturer
Report statement: “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.”
(read more at link above)
The era of electric counting machines has exposed the massive amount of nonlinear problem-solving skills used in government agencies.
Some people appear to believe that using machines for things makes the results infallible- forgetting the first thing we ever learn about machine technology- ‘garbage IN, garbage OUT’.
Defenders of machine counting of ballots are not being reasonable about their product- which is reliable elections.
The fact that even when it is very obvious there is a problem with a government-mandated solution to something, like machine counting and verifying, there is hardly any way to solve the problem quickly and easily.
How can we still be going on and using government resources about the very logical concerns of using machines, handled by partisan workers, to tabulate something as important as our votes?
But here we are. Because now that we have the machines, heaven forbid we get rid of the machines.
Machine tabulators and electronic counting machines were supposed to be the technology to ‘save election officials time’ and make counting ‘nonpartisan’, and what we see from the Kari Lake investigations is that the machines are consuming massive amounts of resources.
There is no two-party authentication, counting and verifying of ballots anymore, machines are supposed to be able to do that for us- better than we could ever hope to do.
However, many people are uncomfortable with using them, especially since so many mistakes are overlooked in the process of glorying the machine’s abilities. Now civil servants spend time trying to make it appear as there are no legitimate reasons to scrutinize machine power.
That is a waste of time.
That is just crazy.
Ben Bergquam, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice highlighted a tweet by Kari Lake’s War Room recently that really illustrates how crazy it is to spend so much time on preparing machines, defending machines, and maintaining machines to do the counting of ballots- and then claim that doing so saves us time from humans counting the ballots ourselves.
“The Plot Thickens”, Lake’s team posted, showing that Maricopa Co did not do a thorough job safeguarding the integrity of the election tabulation.
Lake announced to Bergquam recently that her legal team is appealing a ruling by a judge who appeared to finally squash Lake’s lawsuit against Democrat Katie Hobbs and the election officials in Maricopa Co.
For further reading:
Lake recommended that people read the following thread, which could lead to some understanding about the motivations for the refusal to examine how much time using the machines is costing us: