Maricopa County Machine Malfunction Rate
In violation of Election Assistance Commission Guidelines?
Voting machines are supposed to work well, because when they do not work well, trust in the electoral process breaks down. One requirement for reliability when it comes to voting machines is that there is an average of at least 163 hours of operating time between system failures or breakdowns.
The terminology of the guideline uses the phrase “mean time between failure,” or MTBF, for short
You can find this “your-machines-better-not-fail-any-more-often-than-THIS” guideline in this document:
And if you scroll down to Page 85, you will find the use of the strong word “shall”:
In a 15-hour election day, if any given machine needs to operate without malfunctioning for an average of at least 163 hours, then the upper limit probability of malfunctioning would be (15/163=) 0.092 — or 9.2% chance of malfunctioning.
Another way to put this upper limit would be to say that if 1000 machines were used, no more than 92 of them would be allowed to “fail to function” during election day.
But a news report about the Arizona voting machine malfunctions said that 70 out of 223 vote centers in Maricopa County had machine malfunctions. If vote centers all only had one machine, and 70 of 223 of them broke down during a single 15-hour election day, the malfunction rate would be over 3 times the acceptable limit.
Even if there were an average of 2 machines per vote center, and only 1 machine broke down out of two in 70 of the vote centers, Maricopa County malfunctions would STILL be found to have been outside of acceptable limits.
In fact, even if there were an average of 3 machines per vote center, and only 1 machine broke down out of three in 70 of the vote centers, Maricopa County malfunctions would STILL be found to be outside of acceptable limits for election integrity:
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Reference
[rules regarding which vote-machine failure rates are unacceptable with regard to election integrity] — U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/28/VVSG.1.0_Volume_1.PDF
[document explaining how to apply the 163-hour limit to a 15-hour election day] — VOTING MACHINES: RELIABILITY REQUIREMENTS, METRICS, AND CERTIFICATION. https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/itl/vote/Reliability_Reqs_Metrics_Certification20061019.pdf
[news story reporting on how over 31% of vote centers in Maricopa County had malfunctions on Election Day] — Lake files lawsuit against Maricopa County, demands information about Election Day printer problems. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2022/11/25/kari-lake-files-lawsuit-against-maricopa-county-over-elections/69675926007/
Quote:
Seventy of the county's 223 voting centers experienced problems with on-site printers producing ballots too light to be read by vote-counting machines on Election Day, causing frustration and long lines for voters.