Maricopa County Auditor Bob Hughes Shares How They Use High Tech Equipment to verify Validity of Ballots

Democrats in the Senate must be sweating it out after one of the auditors working for the Arizona Senate, Bob Hughes, explained how and why they use high-tech imaging to reveal if a ballot is legal or not. The thing you need to remember is that in Maricopa County there are many different ballots because of municipal elections. Therefore if the ballot box is stuffed, the ballots would not match up to those counts from the precincts.

Partial results were originally expected to be announced on Monday but the Senate has withheld that until they double and triple-check their counts. They want to release the most accurate counts that they could to keep Democrats from having a talking point as they try to discredit the results. The preliminary results could be available by Wednesday but they are in no hurry to release the information before they are satisfied with its accuracy.

Testimony by Bob Hughes:

The other thing that I think is interesting is they keep saying, ‘They don’t know what they are doing’.  ‘They’re idiots’.  ‘These people are ridiculous’.  ‘They have no idea what they are doing’.  ‘They’ve never done this before’.

This is the first time in the history of the United States, number one, that it’s ever been done, but more importantly it’s the first time it’s ever been needed.  And it was done.

I can tell you that I could go over all the process and you’d all understand, but when a ballot gets created, think about this.  It’s like your bill being paid from SRP.  They go out and get your voter identification number and they find out what precinct you live in, what city, what county, where your school districts are.  All that information has to be accessed to create the proper ballot exactly for you.  Because you have to vote for the right candidates in a city mayoral election, council elections, JP elections, the legislative district, the congressional district.

Think of those as maps that overlay the Maricopa County area and it creates all these little sections, and all these people get a very different ballot.  So if somebody did what we were told they might have done, which is gone out and just duplicate a bunch of ballots, or put the same ballot it many times, or any of these kinds of things, I knew there was a way to find that out.

And so what we did is we, the cameras are not only cameras.  They’re digital cameras.  Digital cameras that are forensic.  They’re actually police forensic cameras.  They’re very, very high speed, high definition digital cameras.  They make a scanned ballot.

So we scan that ballot.  We then use optical character recognition (OCR).  We’re looking at what’s in place on that ballot.  Based on who that ballot is.  How many should be?  Can there be this many?…

…What I can tell you is you now will have the most authentic count of every legal authentic ballot you could possibly have.

Hopefully, we will get the preliminary report soon. had the audit agreed with the original count, the report would have been easy to make, but if the numbers clash it is much harder.