SUPERIOR COURT OF ARIZONA
MARICOPA COUNTY
safeguards include the fact that mail-in ballots are mailed to the voter’s address as listed in voter registration records, and that voters can put their phone number on the envelope/affidavit, which allows election officials to compare that number to the phone number on file from voter registration records or prior ballots.
Maricopa County election officials followed this process faithfully in 2020. Approximately 1.9 million mail-in ballots were cast and, of these, approximately 20,000 were identified that required contacting the voter. Of those, only 587 ultimately could not be validated.
The Court ordered that counsel and their forensic document examiners could review 100 randomly selected envelope/affidavits to do a signature comparison. These were envelope/affidavits as to which election officials had found a signature match, so the ballots were long ago removed and tabulated. Because voter names are on the envelope/affidavits, the Court ordered them sealed. But because the ballots were separated from the envelope/affidavits, there is no way to know how any particular voter voted. The secrecy of their votes was preserved.
Two forensic document examiners testified, one for Plaintiff and one for Defendants. The process forensic document examiners use to testify in court for purposes of criminal guilt or civil liability is much different from the review Arizona election law requires. A document examiner might take hours on a single signature to be able to provide a professional opinion to the required degree of certainty.
Of the 100 envelope/affidavits reviewed, Plaintiff’s forensic document examiner found 6 signatures to be “inconclusive,” meaning she could not testify that the signature on the envelope/affidavit matched the signature on file. She found no sign of forgery or simulation as to any of these ballots.
Defendants’ expert testified that 11 of the 100 envelopes were inconclusive, mostly because there were insufficient specimens to which to compare them. He too found no sign of forgery or simulation, and found no basis for rejecting any of the signatures.
These ballots were admitted at trial and the Court heard testimony about them and reviewed them. None of them shows an abuse of discretion on the part of the reviewer. Every one of them listed a phone number that matched a phone number already on file, either through voter registration records or from a prior ballot. The evidence does not show that these affidavits are fraudulent, or that someone other than the voter signed them. There is no evidence that the manner in which signatures were reviewed was designed to benefit one candidate or another, or that there was any misconduct, impropriety, or violation of Arizona law with respect to the review of mail-in ballots.
