Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
Maricopa County has been reporting a lot of trouble with tabulators. Maricopa County is famous for being the location of "Sharpiegate" in the 2020 election.
Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed. Not all of the ballots were printed on bleed resistant paper, some Trump votes were found to have been lost to bleed through. Not a large number, but it was a real thing.
Problems are being reported at 26+ polling locations. Voters are being told to leave their votes in a locked box to be tabulated at a different location later. There are worries about chain of custody.
Arizona currently has tight races for both the Governor and Senator, so this is going to be a major source of contention going forward.
The original Sharpiegate claim was that tabulating machines rejected ballots filled out with a sharpie marker, and that poll workers were intentionally giving people sharpies to invalidate their ballots. What you're claiming was "confirmed" appears to be a different theory involving bleedthrough, not necessarily machine invalidation.
Either way, what is your source that Sharpiegate v2.0 was confirmed? I was able to find some confirmation that bleed through is possible, but every source I found indicated the ballots were printed off-set to avoid any issues with bleed through. What is your evidence that bleed through caused votes to be lost? How many votes exactly?
I thought that the bleedthrough was supposed to have been leading to machine invalidation, in that the part with the bleedthrough would be read as having multiple selections, and thus a spoiled ballot?
If ballots were indeed being invalidated because of sharpies, your explanation is a plausible one. But what is the evidence that ballots were invalidated? Maricopa election officials issued this statement back in Nov 4 2020:
Has anything come up since to contradict their claims?
The Cyberninjas report definitely shows that the sharpies were bleeding through -- apparently they only examined ~7k ballots for this issue and found none where it caused invalidation -- so probably not a major impact, although they suggest that they found some ballots misaligned due to being printed on normal office printers, which suggests that the offset method was not necessarily failsafe. They promise a full evaluation by some kind of machine analysis, but I'm not sure whether they delivered on this. (ninjas are great on initial action but don't necessarily keep their promises)
This is not an issue I care about either way particularly, but a couple of things occur to me:
Why would you use a sharpie at all? The excuse at the time was that they dry faster than other pens, which seems to me false; normal ballpoint pens have essentially zero dry time, and even the expensive rollerball ones seem faster than a sharpie, which will definitely smudge for a few seconds after use -- and certainly bleed through when ballots are printed on office paper.
It sure is hard to find anything other than "Sharpiegate lol, that was totally debunked dummy" results on Google these days -- I was only able to find the cyberninja report (which actually examines the issue in a serious way, and seems to give a fair assessment of the results) because I remembered that some organization with a dumb name had audited the Maricopa ballots, and thus could search for it directly.
Thank you for digging that up! That's at least plausible indicator that bleed through might theoretically be a problem. I agree with you that the sharpie drying claim is suspicious, based solely on everyday experience, but I also have no idea what kind of paper is used in ballots. The Cyberninjas did, and they could've spent $20 at Office Depot and thoroughly tested this theory out.
@DradisPing could the Cyberninja report be what you remember? If so, does it help you recall where you picked up the other claims of Trump ballots being invalidated because of bleed through?
Sorry had some stuff to do earlier.
So from the time I remember seeing articles like this focussed on bleed through https://itnshow.com/2020/11/07/arizona-election-official-seems-to-confirm-that-bleed-through-from-sharpie-markers-do-impact-votes/
It was a well known issue, Sharpies had been banned in previous elections for that reason. That's why the woman was freaking out.
The response was there was no need to worry because of a combination of offset printing and VoteSecure paper to avoid bleed through issues. It turns out the paper wasn't used in all cases.
https://rumble.com/vjw41g-audit-team-caught-them-ballots-were-on-wrong-paper-stock-verifies-sharpiega.html
https://www.westernjournal.com/az-audit-revelation-wrong-paper-used-ballots-confirm-sharpiegate-according-az-sen-president/
So the paper thing irked me because it was a specific broken promise. If a printout was misaligned then it would register as an invalid over vote.
Someone fairly prominent on Twitter was claiming they found a handful of instances of bleed through invalidating Trump votes, but I can't for the life of me remember who.
If your only evidence of ballots being invalidated from bleed through is that you remember someone prominent saying that on Twitter, do you still stand by that belief?
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