Video footage captured by congressional observers shows a third-party election vendor in Arizona’s largest county processing live ballots and performing signature verification in 2024 far away from the official Maricopa County election center where bipartisan monitors witness such activities, a discovery that prompted the observers to file a formal report alleging “alarming” concerns.The video obtained by Just the News depicts a visit by one Republican and one Democratic congressional staffer to a third-party printing company responsible for conducting signature verification on ballots during the 2024 election.
After that visit, the Republican staffer reported back to Congress in a memo, raising concerns about how the county and its third-party contractor were handling ballots, Just the News exclusively reported last week.
Storage and sorting ballots a serious issue, both parties say
The staffer said that completed mail-in ballots were stored in the same room as blanks and were sorted by a third-party printing company that had no government officials or partisan observers on site.
In the memo, that staffer, a Republican, described in detail his visit to the third-party contractor, Runbeck Election Services, which was hired by Maricopa County to sort mail-in ballots for signature verification in preparation for counting at the county’s main election site.
The Republican staffer was joined by his Democratic counterpart during the visit, who the staffer says shared similar concerns about what they observed at the facility, according to the memo delivered to the House Administration Committee. That’s the legislative panel responsible for overseeing federal elections.
The video was recorded during a tour of the facility conducted by an individual that the staffer described as Runbeck’s CEO in the memo, which was separately reviewed by Just the News.
As the Republican staffer noted in his memo to the House committee, there appeared to be no bipartisan election observers at the facility and workers said that no county election officials were present either.
According to the Arizona Secretary of State’s website, election observers may “observe at a central counting place and at each point where ballots are handled or transferred from one election official to another.”
While the definition does not specifically include third-party sorting sites, observers are permitted to carry out their activity at “any other significant tabulation or processing activities at a central counting place.”
An agreement that Runbeck signed with state lawmakers in early 2024 stated the company agreed to allow political party observers to watch the sorting process in its Maricopa facility after Republicans raised concerns about the third-party contract after the 2022 election, Votebeat Arizona reported.
Neither Runbeck nor Maricopa County responded to renewed requests for comment from Just The News about the congressional staffers’ visit to the Runbeck facility in 2024.
Workers are seen in the video feeding completed mail-in ballots in signature green envelopes through a machine that is supposed to conduct signature verification. The machine sorts those ballots, after which workers prepare them to be shipped back to the main Maricopa County elections facility across town.
Runbeck workers man a ballot sorting machine.
