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Inside a ballot-printing warehouse in an industrial area of ​​Phoenix, paper rolls the size of giant tires and weighing 10 tons are stacked high.

Meanwhile, a paper mill somewhere in Canada has a 350-pound, 6-foot-long machine that stamps secret watermarks on paper.

If you can pick them up (a crane is required), they may soon be yours.

You may be wondering how we got here. As is often the case with Arizona elections, this one is a long story that begins with a conspiracy theory and ends in the southeastern corner of the state.

Cochise County, which received national attention for its attempts to overturn the state's midterm elections, finds itself in a bit of a logjam, a paper jam, after the state's pilot project ended prematurely. I noticed that.

County Recorder David Stevens, who helps run elections, will participate in fall 2022 in a Republican-led state grant program designed to test security features such as watermarks and invisible fibers on ballots. Agreed. But what we didn't anticipate was how long it would take to get up and running.

Stevens missed the grant deadline and tried to get an extension. County officials instead decided to scrap everything. But Stevens had already paid Lambeck Election Services $187,500 for ordering a large number of ballots and commissioning a giant watermarking machine.

what to do with it? The county has no interest in spending local funds because state funding has ended and it costs thousands of dollars to cut the paper into ballots and ship them. Lambeck is repaying the state the $12,000 it would have cost just to reduce the number of ballots. So the next option being considered is the possibility of a public auction, where state taxpayers could recoup some of the costs.

Of course, there are always some small wrinkles to fix. In this case, it is not entirely clear who the actual owner of the watermarking machine called Dandy Roll is. Or who would buy him 10 tons of ballots that might not even be usable? Not tested yet. And, of course, there's the question of whether selling ballots could actually pose the kind of election security risks the pilot was trying to prevent.

Each roll can produce approximately 20,000 ballots.

Runbeck CEO Jeff Ellington was kind enough to provide regular updates as the project started, then shut down, and then stalled.

Last I heard: The giant roll of paper is still on the warehouse floor.

But there are still some questions about how we got here and how everything will play out.

Bamboo fiber and openwork pattern

It all started shortly after the 2020 election, when false claims began circulating that someone had flown fake ballots from South Korea to Maricopa County in an effort to rig the county's election for President Joe Biden.

A few months later, state Rep. Mark Finchem was in the basement of the Capitol with a black light and a sample ballot provided by Stevens. He knew about a company called Authentix that could put all sorts of features on ballots, like watermarks and holograms (a little more than he disclosed, Votebeat found out), and that the company The company was demonstrating the ability to put all sorts of features on ballots, including watermarks and holograms. colleague. Such special features will make it difficult to forge ballots, he said.

Before long, cyber ninjas came to town, Started shining a unique black light on 2020 ballots, are looking for bamboo fibers and watermarks. No one showed up.

Nevertheless, that year and the following year, Mr. Finchem tried to persuade Congress to pass a state law mandating the use of Authentics' secure voting technology, without specifically naming the company. What he won was a $1 million state grant that would give the county the opportunity to test exactly what Authentics could offer, again without naming the company.

Mr. Stevens was the first and only county recorder to apply to join the trial.

By January 2023, he was working with Lambec to order papers and create Dandy Rolls, but there was no public process for soliciting proposals. However, several other things happened regarding Cochise's election during that period, and progress in the case was slow.

By the time Stevens brought Authentics' bid before county supervisors, the original grant deadline in May had passed. The public opposed the proposal, questioning the company's relationship with Finchem, and regulators voted not to proceed with the proposal.

The trial disappeared from the radar, except for local observers who continued to ask questions. After hearing her question, I went back and tried to find out what had happened to the paper in the warehouse.

10 tons of paper

In an interview last month in his office in Bisbee, Stevens told me that when supervisors voted against extending the project's schedule, they cut off his authority and funding. The paper must be cut into ballot-sized pages, a sample ballot printed on the paper, and then tested in a tabulation machine, all at a county expense.

I asked Stevens why this trial needed so much paper in the first place.

He asked me and answered if I had eaten a Big Mac recently. I said no and wondered where this was going to go.

Stevens said this is an analogy he uses to explain how product testing works. According to him, there are only eight main ingredients in a Big Mac (note that he has not fact-checked them), but those eight ingredients can be combined to create thousands of burger combinations. .

In other words, each feature of the ballot paper is tested thousands of times in every possible combination using a tabulator and various printers, and which combinations are accepted by the tabulator and which combinations are not. You need to check whether it is possible.

Ellington later told me the same thing, without the fast food analogy. Oh, and one more thing: “The paper mill had the bare minimum.”

In any case, there are still 10 tons of paper sitting in the warehouse.

After regulators ended the subsidy, the Arizona Department of Administration told Stevens he could either keep the paper and dandy rolls or sell them at a state auction, with the proceeds going to the state. told him that he would receive it.

Simply put, it's not clear who owns Dandy Roll. The invoice between the county and Lambeck states that Lambeck will own Dandy Roll after the grant work is completed. Stevens said she wasn't sure and contacted the state for clarification.

Ellington said he has also contacted the state for clarification. Even if someone else wanted the dandy roll, it would be “uncomfortably difficult” to move it, he said. This is to be stored in a paper mill and used in the paper manufacturing process.

Lambeck believed the machine would keep a dandy roll, so it created a design that stamped the ballots with a checkmark that was not unique to Cochise County and was a faithful replica of its company logo. That way, the company could later create watermarked ballots for the desired county.

We also asked ADOA to explain who owns Dandy Roll. A spokesperson for the agency clarified that it is the county's responsibility to review and resolve the agreement with Lambec.

“We have consistently communicated that it is their responsibility,” spokeswoman Megan Rose said.

As for the watermarked paper, it's clear that the county should keep it, but neither Lambec nor Cochise County seems to want that.

So how much is the unruly 10 ton market worth? It could be bought by state or county officials who want to proceed with trials. Maybe a school could buy it and use it for endless art projects.

But auctioning is not without its pitfalls. Ellington raised the possibility that buyers were trying to bring fake ballots into the election. Of course, there are many safeguards to prevent this from happening. Even if someone were to buy the paper and find a giant machine that precisely cuts the ballots, they could sneak into the county's secure election space and insert the ballots, avoiding cameras, employees, and political observers. There is a need to. This disrupts the auditing measures that are in place to ensure that each registered voter's ballot is his only one.

However, this concern is not lost on Stevens.

“This is one of several concerns we (the county) are discussing,” he wrote. “Photocopying your ballot is now available to anyone with 80# paper, a scanner, and a printer.”

“This is something that the subsidy was supposed to eliminate,” he added.

Jen Fifield is a Votebeat reporter based in Arizona. Contact Jen: jfifield@votebeat.org.