Ballots filled out with Sharpies in Arizona’s most populous county did not result in invalidated ballots and voter suppression, the state’s top legal office determined.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, said in a letter Thursday that after learning more from the Maricopa County Election Department, he is “satisfied that the mere use of Sharpie brand markers in Maricopa County did not result in disenfranchisement.”
That determination could harm a lawsuit filed by a conservative legal group on Wednesday. Voter Laurie Aguilera was provided a Sharpie to fill out her ballot, but it did not register in a voting machine, according to the lawsuit. She said that poll workers refused to give her a new ballot.
Brnovich said Wednesday that it had received hundreds of complaints from “concerned voters” about using Sharpie markers rather than ballpoint pens to mark ballots, and videos and social media posts warning about the use of Sharpies went viral earlier his week.
People claimed that vote-counting machines would not be able to read the ballots marked in Sharpie in part because of ink bleeding through the paper. They suggested that the use of Sharpies was a deliberate attempt to keep votes for President Trump from counting because votes cast on Election Day rather than by mail were expected to favor the president, while early and mail-in votes were expected to favor Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
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Based on correspondence and conversations with Maricopa County officials, we are now confident that the use of Sharpie markers did not result in disenfranchisement for Arizona voters. We appreciate the county’s prompt insight and assurances to address public concerns. pic.twitter.com/NdYLsEAvwd
— Mark Brnovich (@GeneralBrnovich) November 6, 2020
Had those concerns been accurate, it could have aided Trump in increasing his vote share in the state. Fox News and the Associated Press called the state for Biden on election night, infuriating the Trump campaign, which projected that the outstanding Election Day ballots will favor the president and give him a lead in the state.
Trump lags nearly 44,000 votes behind Biden in Arizona. The state has around 220,000 outstanding ballots that have not yet been counted, with 140,000 of those in Maricopa County. Recent updates of ballots suggest that Trump is not on track to win outstanding ballots by a large enough margin to overtake Biden’s lead.
In response to the attorney general’s request for more information, the Maricopa County Elections Department refuted the claims that Sharpies complicated votes, noting that the marker is, in fact, recommended by the manufacturer of the county’s vote tabulation machines.
“Ink from ballpoint pens can cause smudges in the machines and foul them, while Sharpie markers do not,” Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel said in a letter Thursday. “Any ‘bleed through’ caused by the ink cannot create false votes or cause a voter’s intended vote to be miscounted.”
All 175 voting locations in the county provided Sharpie markers, and the elections department said that every voter whose ballot had an issue with the voting machine counting their vote was provided the ability to cast a new one.
Various news outlets and fact-checking websites had previously declared concerns about the use of Sharpies to be a false conspiracy theory, as did Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.
“All of those ballots are being counted. And even if the machines can’t read them for some reason, the marker bled through to the other side, we have ways to count them,” Hobbs said Wednesday on CNN. “They’re going to be counted. There’s absolutely no merit to saying this was some conspiracy to invalidate Republican ballots.”
In the Thursday letter, Brnovich took a dig at those who quickly brushed off Sharpie ballot issues.
“While some have attempted to characterize those complaints as a product of a ‘conspiracy theory,’ it was necessary and appropriate for AGO to conduct some investigation, rather than simply brushing hundreds of Arizona voters off, and to obtain information from the elected officials actually tasked with tabulating votes,” Brnovich said.
