(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) After yet another round of ballot-box chaos on Tuesday, officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, have apologized for their poor election administration and lack of efficiency in counting ballots, Fox News reported.
Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates issued an apology after more than 20% of the county’s polling sites almost immediately faced tabulation difficulties that the county later attributed to a faulty printer setting.
“Apologized yesterday. I will do it again today,” Gates said. “What happened yesterday we cannot have a repeat of. We are already looking very closely at what happened.”
Chairman @billgatesaz shared information about the printer issue, and the resolution now being deployed to the remaining affected locations: pic.twitter.com/xTPR6vBZTn
— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) November 8, 2022
Over 17,000 in-person ballots issued on election day have still not been counted.
“Obviously, our team was able to come up with a fix yesterday for what happened, so that allowed those votes centers to get back online,” Gates said.
“But again, we are going to do a deep dive on this,” he continued. “This board will get to the bottom of exactly what happened, and we will do what needs to be done.”
He was, however, quick to add that he did not believe that there was any partisan hackery afoot.
“With regard to ‘criminal’ or ‘rigged,’ there is absolutely no basis for that statement,” he said.
Gates also suggested that he expects 99% of the ballots to be counted by Friday, although other statements have hinted that the county was prepared to take weeks if necessary.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who was tied at 50% with Democrat Katie Hobbs on Thursday afternoon, with 70% of the state’s ballots counted, told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night that fixing the broken and embarrasing system would be one of her first priorities if elected, alongside closing the porous southern border.
Lake noted that many of the affected precincts in Maricopa—which encompasses the Phoenix metropolitan area—had been Republican-heavy districts, fueling suspicious anew after the county became a focal point of vote-fraud allegations in the 2020 election.
In light of the recent developments, Carlson on Tuesday called for the end of electronic ballot counting.
“We’re not really very serious about democracy if we’re using electronic voting machines, or for not requiring photo ID to vote,” Carlson said.
