Voting in Maricopa County, AZ
Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2022 9:54 pm
I saw Fox News is running a headline about this so I thought I'd share my experience voting in person this morning in Phoenix. From arrival to leaving took 1 hour and 10 minutes.
I arrived at the polling location closest to where I Iive a little before polls opened at 6 AM and found an expected line of maybe 100-150 people. The doors opened and immediately the line began moving quickly...but all largely due to about half of those waiting having drop off ballots. Once the folks with drop off ballots had cleared, the line came to a halt. Roughly every five minutes or so for the better part of twenty minutes a person would come out, count how many people were in line, and make an announcement that there were technical issues they were working on fixing.
Those technical issues turned out to be problems with the system that allows a Maricopa County voter to show up at any poll station regardless of where they live. The system is supposedly automated but monitored. I was able to scan my ID and review my information easily, but the touch screen used to collect my signature was problematic, requiring a poll worker to confirm my photo ID against the screen. This seemed to be the case for most people registering.
The issue that delayed voting occured after this step. Once a voter had registered at the polling station, a ballot and receipt was printed for the voter to fill out but the system had not been connecting with the printers initially. So no ballots were able to be printed until the connection issue was resolved. It took 15 to 20 minutes for the poll workers to get it working. Once that was fixed it seemed this ran smoothly the rest of the time I was there.
Voting itself was straightforward enough if oddly exposed. A line ran directly behind my little popup table "voting booth" so I listened to a handful of people disparaging the 2020 election results and all things Democrat standing 6 or so feet away while I was filling out my ballot. Had they wished they could easily have watched me fill in my circles. This wasn't due to the line being planned to run behind polling "booths" but rather due to people making their own lines waiting to have their ballots scanned and collected.
This is where the Fox News story focuses. The machines that collected the ballots were scanners about the size of a desktop printer. The scanner requires the voter to insert their own ballot into the machine which it then draws in, scans, and either accepts or rejects. Almost every person I saw ahead of me had to make a couple of attempts. It was very very similar to being in line at a vending machine where every person approaching it only has dollars, most of which did not get accepted initially. This started to become the new hang up in the process as people would make a few attempts to have their ballot accepted, then move to the other machine to see if it worked better there. One of the machines seemed more tolerant than the other.
Because this took so long to get through I was able to observe it also rejected ballots with issues such as people having filled in two options where only one was allowed. It also asked a person to verify if they intended to not cast a vote for categories and told them which sections were missed.
My ballot was accepted first try. There were a few immediately ahead of me who were also lucky.
I also declined to fill out a survey regarding my voting experience.
I arrived at the polling location closest to where I Iive a little before polls opened at 6 AM and found an expected line of maybe 100-150 people. The doors opened and immediately the line began moving quickly...but all largely due to about half of those waiting having drop off ballots. Once the folks with drop off ballots had cleared, the line came to a halt. Roughly every five minutes or so for the better part of twenty minutes a person would come out, count how many people were in line, and make an announcement that there were technical issues they were working on fixing.
Those technical issues turned out to be problems with the system that allows a Maricopa County voter to show up at any poll station regardless of where they live. The system is supposedly automated but monitored. I was able to scan my ID and review my information easily, but the touch screen used to collect my signature was problematic, requiring a poll worker to confirm my photo ID against the screen. This seemed to be the case for most people registering.
The issue that delayed voting occured after this step. Once a voter had registered at the polling station, a ballot and receipt was printed for the voter to fill out but the system had not been connecting with the printers initially. So no ballots were able to be printed until the connection issue was resolved. It took 15 to 20 minutes for the poll workers to get it working. Once that was fixed it seemed this ran smoothly the rest of the time I was there.
Voting itself was straightforward enough if oddly exposed. A line ran directly behind my little popup table "voting booth" so I listened to a handful of people disparaging the 2020 election results and all things Democrat standing 6 or so feet away while I was filling out my ballot. Had they wished they could easily have watched me fill in my circles. This wasn't due to the line being planned to run behind polling "booths" but rather due to people making their own lines waiting to have their ballots scanned and collected.
This is where the Fox News story focuses. The machines that collected the ballots were scanners about the size of a desktop printer. The scanner requires the voter to insert their own ballot into the machine which it then draws in, scans, and either accepts or rejects. Almost every person I saw ahead of me had to make a couple of attempts. It was very very similar to being in line at a vending machine where every person approaching it only has dollars, most of which did not get accepted initially. This started to become the new hang up in the process as people would make a few attempts to have their ballot accepted, then move to the other machine to see if it worked better there. One of the machines seemed more tolerant than the other.
Because this took so long to get through I was able to observe it also rejected ballots with issues such as people having filled in two options where only one was allowed. It also asked a person to verify if they intended to not cast a vote for categories and told them which sections were missed.
My ballot was accepted first try. There were a few immediately ahead of me who were also lucky.
I also declined to fill out a survey regarding my voting experience.