Arizona Senate Must Obtain Original Ballot Envelope Images from Runbeck and Deliver Them to Dr. Shiva

 

The Arizona Senate should obtain the original images of Maricopa envelope signatures and deliver them to Dr. Shiva for his review.

These original images were created by Runbeck Election Services between Oct 9th – Nov. 12th. Runbeck is an election services company based in Phoenix that prints ballots for elections in Arizona and other states.  Runbeck has these hi-res images in their unaltered form because they were created at their Phoenix headquarters. They were processed on Runbeck’s own high-speed scanners, using their own internal software. Runbeck delivered these images to Maricopa’s MCTEC center in small batches in the days leading up to the 2020 election, and for 10 days afterward.

Maricopa County lied between April and August, repeatedly stating they handed over envelope signature images.

Senate auditors finally received them on August 19th. This gave Dr. Shiva and his team less than 3 weeks to analyze nearly 2 million images, a herculean effort. But the delays and lies by Maricopa Supervisors gave the County over 9 months to alter, manipulate, or delete these signature image files. Dr. Shiva had to review the bundle of sh*t handed over by Maricopa, not the original signature images created by Runbeck.

The Senate played silly cat and mouse games to obtain data from the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. Karen Fann even admitted some actions were scripted behind the scenes with certain Supervisors. But just 6 miles away was a small company with original election data. Runbeck printed and mailed the ballots and has the entire unaltered “qualified voter” list. These lists contain 36 fields of data on every voter who was mailed a ballot in Maricopa. It’s unclear how many lists were provided to Runbeck during October as the registration deadline repeatedly changed. This could be at the core of the problem with duplicate ballots. But AZ Senate has not asked Runbeck to turn over these lists or the original envelope images. Runbeck is not mentioned in any Senate subpoena.

In April and August of 2021 Runbeck landed new contracts with Arizona’s Pinal and Mohave County, respectively. You would think Runbeck would comply with any AZ Senate requests in fear of losing all business opportunities in Arizona. Losing their top clients might force Runbeck to close their new 90,000 sq. ft. Phoenix headquarters. Most notice that Arizona politicians rarely mention Runbeck or their access to key election data. During several July interviews Fann promised to process FOIA requests, hold hearings, have election employees testify under oath, and subpoena communications. None of this has happened. Why was Ken Bennett involved if he couldn’t inform auditors accurately, or obtain key data from tiny Runbeck?

BALLOT RECAP: Every returned mail-in ballot in Maricopa County goes first to Runbeck Election Services.

They scan the signature area on the outside of EVERY ballot envelope. A small batch of these images are then sent to Maricopa County MCTEC for signature matching by poll workers.

MCTEC then tells Runbeck which envelopes have bad signatures. Runbeck separates out these bad signature envelopes at their HQ, then delivers both batches six miles to MCTEC. Maricopa opens these envelopes, removes the ballots, and sends them to tabulation. This “batch” process of scanning envelope signatures starts in early October as ballots start to come in. It ends about 10 days after the election when they finally complete the evaluation of all the signature images.