New Questions About Off Site Third-Party Ballot Handling In Maricopa County

By Steven Richards and John Solomon | Just the News

Video footage captured by congressional observers shows a third-party election vendor in Arizona’s largest county processing live ballots and performing signature verification in 2024 far away from the official Maricopa County election center where bipartisan monitors witness such activities, a discovery that prompted the observers to file a formal report alleging “alarming” concerns.

The video obtained by Just the News depicts a visit by one Republican and one Democratic congressional staffer to a third-party printing company responsible for conducting signature verification on ballots during the 2024 election. 

After that visit, the Republican staffer reported back to Congress in a memo, raising concerns about how the county and its third-party contractor were handling ballots, Just the News exclusively reported last week.     

Storage and sorting ballots a serious issue, both parties say

The staffer said that completed mail-in ballots were stored in the same room as blanks and were sorted by a third-party printing company that had no government officials or partisan observers on site.

In the memo, that staffer, a Republican, described in detail his visit to the third-party contractor, Runbeck Election Services, which was hired by Maricopa County to sort mail-in ballots for signature verification in preparation for counting at the county’s main election site. 

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