Nov. 12, 2022 - Epoch Times
12:11
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| It's now officially been three full days after the midterm elections. | |
| And if you take a look at a map of the results, you will find that almost all of the states have already called their races one way or the other. | |
| However, there are a few notable exceptions. | |
| You have Georgia, which is going to have a runoff election. | |
| You have Alaska, which uses a ranked choice voting system, which takes a bit of extra time. | |
| And then you have the curious cases of Arizona and Nevada, two states that still have so many outstanding ballots left to count that a result cannot yet even be determined. | |
| So the big question here is obviously why. | |
| Why is it taking so long for these states to count their ballots? | |
| Well, in order to answer that question, let's set aside Nevada for the time being and instead do a deep dive into Arizona, where the Secretary of State's office just came out and released a statement saying that across the entire state, There remain almost 620,000 ballots left to be counted, with 407,000 of them being in Maricopa County alone. | |
| Now, let me back up for a moment and set the stage for you properly in regards to what's actually happening over in Arizona. | |
| Early on November 8th, Tuesday, November 8th, which is Election Day, we began to get reports of people who are having trouble voting in person. | |
| As an example of what I actually mean by that, Someone personally, someone I know personally over in Phoenix, he sent me this photo here of what he saw when he went to his local polling station. | |
| It was a little piece of paper posted on the wall which said this, We are experiencing technical difficulties. | |
| Our tabulators, meaning the ballot scanners, are not working. | |
| If you vote here, your ballot will be collected to be tabulated later. | |
| Or you can go to a nearby site that is working. | |
| And then right below it lists several close polling stations. | |
| And indeed, shortly after all these reports began to appear on social media on Election Day, well, officials in Maricopa County, they came out and they announced that the tabulators in about 20 percent of the different polling sites within the county were malfunctioning. | |
| Here's specifically what the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a man by the name of Bill Gates, said as a part of a statement to the press. | |
| In about 20 percent of the vote centers, again, we have 223 vote centers across the county, In about 20% of those, when people will go and they try and run the ballot through this tabulator, maybe one out of every five or so of those ballots, they're not going through. | |
| He then further went on to say within his statement that this wasn't actually stopping people from voting, since instead of running the ballots through the machine, they were able to instead throw them into a drop box to be counted later. | |
| Here's what he added. | |
| This is something we've prepared for. | |
| We have a redundancy. | |
| If the ballot will not go through this tabulator, and by the way, those ballots that go through this tabulator, they go back here in the machine. | |
| If their ballot's not going through the tabulator, then we will ask them to go here at door number three and place their ballot into this secure box. | |
| Those ballots will remain secure in there all day long, and at the end of voting, after 7 p.m., when everything is completed, then these ballots will be taken out securely and delivered by a bipartisan team, so Republican and Democrat, down to here at the Central Tabulation Center, where they will be tabulated. | |
| Essentially, with his reassuring statement, he was saying that people who wanted to vote in person at these different sites were given one of three different options. | |
| They could either wait around for these tabulators to come back online, they could drop off their ballots into the number three slot into the tabulator, which would be then counted later, or they could drive to another polling location. | |
| Now, eventually, the election officials came out again, and they said that they found the problem, which allegedly had something to do with the printers not printing darkly enough. | |
| Here was the updated statement from the Maricopa County officials, again delivered on Election Day. | |
| Quote, Then, in terms of the number of ballots that were ultimately affected by this, in terms of the number of ballots that were ultimately affected by this, well, here was what the Quote... | |
| The issue impacted less than 7% of Election Day voters, or about 17,000 ballots that were dropped into secure slots at the tabulators. | |
| Although the statement doesn't mention how many people left the polling site in frustration. | |
| Now, we here at the Epoch Times did reach out to Maricopa County officials in order to get more clarification on how and why this all happened, but we have yet to hear back. | |
| Regardless, though... | |
| With this situation seemingly having been resolved, we can flash forward to today, which is now three full days after the actual election, and we received an official update from the Arizona Secretary of State's office. | |
| And just as an interesting aside, the Arizona Secretary of State happens to be Miss Katie Hobbs, who also happens to be running for governor against Carrie Lake. | |
| And before the election, she actually refused to recuse herself, meaning that, essentially, Miss Katie Hobbs is the highest-level election official in Arizona, overseeing her own election for governor. | |
| That's pretty cool. | |
| However, aside from that caveat, her office released an update on the numbers, saying that across the entire state, there still remain almost 620,000 ballots left to be counted, with 407,000 of those ballots being in Maricopa County alone. | |
| And in regards to Maricopa County, the chairman of the board of supervisors there gave a short press briefing where he went through some of the numbers. | |
| And he explained that included in this 407,000 outstanding ballots are 290,000 mail-in ballots that were dropped off in person at poll sites on Election Day. | |
| 86,000 early ballots that were processed late last week and still need to be tabulated. | |
| It includes another roughly 50,000 early ballots that were dropped off on Monday, as well as around 17,000 ballots from in-person voters who were forced to put their ballots into a secure slot because of the alleged printer issue with the tabulating machine. | |
| And so the way that the process works over in Arizona is that election officials process the early ballots first. | |
| And only then, once they finish processing these ballots, do they move on and process the ballots of the people who voted in person on Election Day. | |
| Meaning that since there is such a large backlog of early votes still to be counted, we quite literally have not even seen the tallies for the in-person voters yet. | |
| All those people who went to the polls on Election Day, stood in line, and of course the people who had to deal with the tabulation machines that wouldn't receive their ballots, and so they had to put their ballots into those secure boxes, all those people's votes have yet to be counted. | |
| And of course, recently, the people who vote in person on Election Day tend to lean more Republican. | |
| Meaning that when we look at the current governor's race in Arizona, with Carrie Lake trailing the Secretary of State Katie Hobbs by only about 27,000 votes, well, that difference could easily be made up by these yet-to-be-counted ballots. | |
| Now, the next logical question that you are probably wondering is how long exactly will these outstanding ballots take to count? | |
| And the answer is that it might actually take a little bit of time. | |
| Because these early mail-in ballots have to go through a signature verification process. | |
| Here's in fact how the Maricopa County recorder described it during a... | |
| Once they go through signature verification, once they are deemed good signature, once they go through an audit queue, then they can be sent ahead to the board for tabulation. | |
| This number is immense, but it does inhibit us from having a higher percentage of returns available within the first 24-48 hours. | |
| But it is important that we do signature verify all of those because it is how we confirm your identity. | |
| And then furthermore, after that press conference, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Mr. | |
| Bill Gates, he was asked directly by a reporter as to when the results can be expected. | |
| And here's what he said. | |
| When do you anticipate the votes will be counted in total, those 400,000-plus votes? | |
| Well, we will be going into next week. | |
| There's some onesie-twosies, again, pursuant to Arizona law. | |
| But I think that we'll see the lion's share here wrap up by early next week. | |
| Early next week, can you give me a day? | |
| Are we talking Monday? | |
| Maybe. | |
| As long as you won't hold me to it. | |
| But I think that's what we're looking at this point. | |
| Again, given the number of ballots here, the Arizona laws that we have to follow, and the fact that accuracy comes first. | |
| If that does not inspire confidence, well, I don't know what does. | |
| And just as an aside, I've heard people say that it makes sense that it's taking so long, given the fact that Maricopa County is such a large county, with quite literally about 62% of the Arizona population living in that one county alone. | |
| However, when you consider that there are other large populous states, like Florida, for instance, which has quite literally three times the population of Arizona, and yet Florida finished counting all of their votes on election night. | |
| And so with references like that, it really makes you wonder why exactly is Arizona's elections being run the way they are. | |
| Regardless, if you'd like to read more about the current situation out in Arizona, I'll throw several links down into the description box below for you to peruse. | |
| And then also, I would love to know your thoughts on the current situation. | |
| Why do you think it's taking so long for all these tallies to come in? | |
| Do you think that the forensic election audit that was conducted in Maricopa County last year, do you think it should have spurred more of a focus on tightening up the post-election protocols in order to avoid situations like this? | |
| And also, do you believe that all states, every single state in the entire nation, should take a hard look at what Florida is doing in order to see how they're able to be so fast and accurate in the results that come back on Election Day? | |
| Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below. | |
| I'll be reading them later today, tomorrow, as well as over the weekend. | |
| I'd love to know your thoughts. | |
| And then lastly, as you're making your way down there to the description box for the links and the comments section to leave your comments, take a short detour to smash, smash, smash that like button so this video can be shared out to ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| And also consider subscribing to this YouTube channel as well if you haven't already. | |
| That way you can get this type of honest news content delivered directly into your YouTube feed every time we publish it. | |
| Alright, just to pause here for a super quick moment, I wanted to mention that the sponsor of today's episode is a super cool company called Secure. | |
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| And lastly, on a slightly different topic, over on Epic TV, which is our awesome no-censorship video platform, I just published a super spicy episode of Facts Matter, wherein we went through some of the different studies detailing how the spike protein leads to blood clots throughout the entire body, including some blood clots that morticians are saying are long, sometimes even several feet long, twisted and winding, and being found in more and more corpses. | |
| If you'd like to watch that episode, you can find it exclusively over on Epic TV. I'd love to publish here on YouTube, but unfortunately that type of episode cannot be here on YouTube just because the algorithm will pull out certain words and then they might just censor out the entire episode without even anything. | |
| Then I can appeal it, but then it'll just come back to me saying, hey, we reviewed your appeal, but there's nothing we can do. | |
| That's just the reality of the censorship regime here on YouTube and of dealing with these algorithmic computers rather than actual people with thinking minds. | |
| Regardless, though, if you'd like to check out that episode in its glorious entirety, you can do so over on EpicTV. | |
| I'll throw a link to it. | |
| It'll be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. |
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