SUPERIOR COURT OF ARIZONA
MARICOPA COUNTY
Third, Plaintiff alleges errors in the duplication of ballots. Arizona law requires election officials to duplicate a ballot under a number of circumstances. One is where the voter is overseas and submits a ballot under UOCAVA, the Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Another is where the ballot is damaged or otherwise cannot be machine-tabulated. When a duplicate is necessary, a bipartisan board creates a duplicate ballot based on the original. A.R.S. § 16-621(A). In 2020, Maricopa County had 27,869 duplicate ballots out of more than 2 million total ballots. The vast majority of these were either mail-in ballots or UOCAVA ballots. 999 of them came from polling places.
The Court ordered that counsel could review 100 duplicate ballots. Maricopa County voluntarily made another 1,526 duplicate ballots available for review. These ballots do not identify the voter so, again, there is no way to know how any individual voter voted. Of the 1,626 ballots reviewed, 9 had an error in the duplication of the vote for president.
Plaintiff called a number of witnesses who observed the duplication process as credentialed election observers. There was credible testimony that they saw errors in which the duplicated ballot did not accurately reflect the voter’s apparent intent as reflected on the original ballot. This testimony is corroborated by the review of the 1,626 duplicate ballots in this case, and it confirms both that there were mistakes in the duplication process, and that the mistakes were few. When mistakes were brought to the attention of election workers, they were fixed.
The duplication process prescribed by the Legislature necessarily requires manual action and human judgment, which entail a risk of human error. Despite that, the duplication process for the presidential election was 99.45% accurate. And there is no evidence that the inaccuracies were intentional or part of a fraudulent scheme. They were mistakes. And given both the small number of duplicate ballots and the low error rate, the evidence does not show any impact on the outcome.
The Court finds no misconduct, no fraud, and no effect on the outcome of the election.
4. The Evidence Does Not Show Illegal Votes.
A.R.S. § 16-672(A)(2) permits an election contest “[o]n account of illegal votes.” Based on the facts found above, the evidence did not prove illegal votes, much less enough to affect the outcome of the election. As a matter of law, mistakes in the duplication of ballots that do not affect the outcome of the election do not satisfy the burden of proof under Section 16-672(A)(2).
