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Report: Voters in GOP Districts in AZ Forced to Use Sharpies, Invalidating Their Ballots

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In multiple GOP districts in Arizona, voters were reportedly given sharpie pens to fill out their ballots Tuesday, rather than ball point pens, causing their ballots to be invalidated.

American Conservative Matt Schlapp sounded the alarm on Twitter Wednesday.

 

Voters from Maricopa County, Tucson, and Gilbert shared stories about being handed sharpie pens to fill out their ballots.

Schlapp shared a link where Arizona voters can check the status of their vote:

An Arizona voter explained on camera how the poll workers insisted that people fill out the ballots using sharpies. A man who was standing outside handing voters ball point pens, said poll workers actually called the sheriff to stop him from helping voters cast valid ballots.

A voter in Michigan said that the same thing happened to her.

Update:

A spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department told AZ Family that sharpies are the preferred writing utinsil for filling out a ballot.

Erika Flores said voters can use one of three types of writing utensils to cast their ballots: black pens, blue pens, or sharpies.

You read that correctly. Sharpies are allowed. That’s because the new tabulation equipment counts votes in a such a way that bleed-throughs are not a problem.

Not only are Sharpies accepted when filling out a ballot in Maricopa County, they are preferred. That’s because Sharpies have the fastest drying ink.

It wasn’t clear what was causing the ballots filled out with a sharpie to be invalidated.

About Debra Heine

Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.

Photo: (Photo by Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images)

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2 responses to “Report: Voters in GOP Districts in AZ Forced to Use Sharpies, Invalidating Their Ballots”

  1. I was told to use a sharpie and even though I had the ballot mailed to me and had it all filled out with pen, they reprinted another one thst I could not track. 3 days later got a notice saying they never delivered my ballot.

  2. I’ve voted by mail, this year I hand carried my ballot and my wife’s to a poll last Wednesday, and we’ve uses Sharpies for years. Paying attention to not press and bleed, but checking the website, mine and hers were both received and counted. Unless they are imprecise on the ‘counting’ part, this isn’t as much as people think, though our county officials have their moments when we wonder.